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The Society for Research into Higher Education

Tag Archives: mental wellbeing


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The importance of academic mental health

by Roz Collings

It was University Mental Health day on Thursday 14th March 2024. This is a national UK project organised by Student Minds and University Mental Health Advisory Network, aiming to start a conversation to ensure university wide mental health is a priority.  I continue to be an advocate for whole institution wellbeing, enhancing focus on academics in policies and practice, as well as increasing impactful research regarding academic mental health so it was pleasing to see university staff being given a spotlight..

The mental health of students has long been a topic of interest with decades of primary research, systematic reviews and meta-analyses, alongside cross cultural comparisons, highlighting the poor mental health of University Students in comparison to the general public (Brown, 2018; Campbell et al, 2022; Macaskill, 2013). The COVID pandemic created a further influx of concentrated efforts in finding supportive solutions for the student mental health crisis (Chen and Lucock, 2022; Copeland et al, 2021). It is also well evidenced that poor mental health of students is strongly related to poor academic outcomes such as achievement and retention (Pascoe et al, 2019; Thomas et al, 2021).

But what do we know about academic mental health? Historically academic staff mental health has received minimal attention. Although investment in the area is growing, a recent systematic review highlighted the stressful academic environment and higher levels of burnout within the industry compared to other jobs (Urbina-Garcia, 2020). Increased workloads, pressures of research funding, lack of work-life balance and lack of management support are universal trends globally (Kinman and Jones, 2008) leading to many university academics leaving the profession (Heffernan et al, 2019; Ligibel et al, 2023). Dr Zoe Ayres created a poster of common stressors for academics for part of the mental health series (see Figure 1) which highlights the multiple facets and identities an academic contends with within their working life. Academia has changed substantially even within the 23 years I have been working. Centralisation and reduction of academic administrative staff moves much of the work onto the academics. With the increased focus on student mental health has come an increased reliance on academics for pastoral support. In addition performance indicators such as retention, satisfaction etc have become important outcome measures for all staff appraisals, no matter the level.

Figure 1

UK university Equity/ Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) initiatives developed from the Athena SWAN (Scientific Women’s Academic Network) Charter through Advance HE and focused initially on gender equality. Since then Advance HE has also developed the “race charter”. However, by 2021 there remained little engagement in disability equality and the intersectionality of disabled people with other EDI groups (Wolbring and Lillywhite, 2021). The University of Wolverhampton has a disability charter and is showing meaningful positive shifts towards inclusivity when it considers all the protected characteristics. However, I sit on university and national disability boards and the conversations around mental health (dis) abilities seem forced and an afterthought. My own recent research has shown high levels of stigma associated with disclosing of mental ill health and a fear of how that information would be used. Staff were concerned that they would not be taken seriously in their roles, that they would be unable to progress in their career and that their colleagues would see them as a “weak link” (Collings, 2023). I personally didn’t disclose mental ill health to my line managers until I was 15 years into my academic career and there remain concerns of how it may impact my progression.

It is time for some significant changes to happen in our profession. All of my team are deeply passionate about supporting our students with understanding and a great deal of knowledge. We should show the same level of compassion towards ourselves and our colleagues.  The culture of the university needs to change rapidly to destigmatise mental ill health disclosure and provide meaningful interventions and support. But “it seems likely that the peculiar nature of higher education actively encourages particular kinds of bullying” (Tight, 2023, p123) and research continues to highlight that bullying in UK and international HE remains rife (Tight, 2023).

What can universities do?

Universities need a fundamental shift to consider wellbeing as an institutional whole. Academic staff wellbeing is just as important as, if not more important than, student mental health. As Richard Branson once wrote “if you look after your staff they’ll look after your customers. It’s that simple”. It is that simple, and this mentality should be applied to staff and students. Academic staff who are well and focused will offer the best support, guidance and teaching to your students. Therefore, I argue that whole university mental health, with academic and professional services included, should be to the fore in university policies and higher management discussions. Higher management should be role modelling work-life balance and self-care, so it can trickle down and change the message from presenteeism and overworking to maintaining a correct sustainable balance of work and life. Developing disability equality charters enables institutions to consider their own policies in relation to institutional culture, dignity at work, grievance policies, absence policies (to incorporate disability sickness), reasonable adjustments and workload modelling. These should not be reactive but more proactive in nature, with meaningful interventions that maintain the interconnection between staff and students (Brewster et al, 2022).

Roz Collings is Associate Professor and Head of Psychology in the School of Psychology in the University of Wolverhampton’s Faculty of Education, Health and Wellbeing. She is the editor of the Research into Higher Education Abstracts journal. Roz is passionate about evidence based practice in Higher Education, raising the quality and impact of Higher Education Research and coaching/ mentoring new researchers in research design and statistical analysis. Her current research is focusing on Academic Wellbeing and she was part of the team writing the Disability Equality Act for the University of Wolverhampton with a role focusing on Mental Health. 

This is an adapted version of a blog first published on the University of Wolverhampton website and is reproduced here with permission.

Reference

Collings, R (2023) Academic Mental Health in Higher Education European Congress of Psychology Brighton, July 2023


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Learned Words – how poetry might help staff in HE to feel more at home

by Sam Illingworth

Poetry has the potential to build communities and provide shelter for people who otherwise feel isolated. Whether using poetry as a method of spiritual and mental healing in palliative care or being used to foster community development and positive change, poetry has the power to heal, support, and engender action. Similarly, community engagement projects such as Talking Wellness and The Good Listening Project have been designed to develop social capital and enhance community engagement for often marginalised communities, encouraging participants to reduce the stigma around mental health and wellbeing by talking about it through poetry.

Poetry also has a long history of helping to explore issues of belonging, from using poetry to support women in prison, to aiding student nurses explore the complexities of compassion fatigue. Within the context of higher education, there are also examples of poetry being used to help students cope with stress and anxiety, as well as instances of poetry being used to improve presentational technique and to explore teacher-student relationships. However, to date there is a relative paucity of work exploring how poetry might be used to help staff working in higher education to address their own sense of belonging in what can, at times, be a somewhat harsh and unwelcoming landscape.

As a way of trying to address this gap, and to explore the potential for helping those working in higher education, we set up Learned Words as an anonymous repository of poetry; a place to curate the poetic reflections of people from around the world who support learning and teaching in higher education.

Whether it be the exclusivity evidenced in ‘Barred Doors’:

I know whiskey when I smell it
Down the hall and through the corridors
The chosen scent of patriarchy
Accept it or the doors are barred

Or the lack of institutional support discussed in ‘Imposter Syndrome’:

Is it imposter syndrome
When I strongly believe I should be here
Yet
You tell me I don’t belong.

Learned Words was set up so that readers might reflect on their own experiences and find solace and hope in the words of others. Poetry has the capacity to lay bare that which cannot otherwise be said, providing a frame for reflection, recognition, and perhaps even reconnection. We acknowledge that each poem will be encountered differently to each reader, and that what might resonate for some will contend for others; such is the subjective nature of the medium. In presenting these poems we also hope to provide some creative playfulness to complement the profound; something which readers might find in these lines from  ‘Inner Monologue at a Conference’:

Free wine and coffee combine to create
An atmosphere of compulsory enjoyment;
Conference assistants and helpers tell me:
This is the friendliest conference in humanity.
I see a former colleague and bow my head,
We pass like kidney stones in the night.

We welcome poems from anyone working in the higher education sector; there is no gatekeeping with regards to aesthetics, reputation, or succinctness of thought. Rather, we want to create a space were everyone is welcome to read, to write, and ultimately to belong.

Dr Sam Illingworth is an Associate Professor at Edinburgh Napier University, whose research centres on using poetry and games to help develop dialogue between communities. You can find out more about his research via his website www.samillingworth.com and connect with him on twitter @samillingworth. 


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How are you today, on a scale of 0-10?

By Paul Temple

I do like a nice two-by-two matrix, don’t you? I’ve been told that they’re such a feature of teaching at Harvard Business School that the whiteboards there come with the gridlines ready-marked (that’s in the “too good to check” category, by the way, in case you’re a HBS alum). So my attention was immediately caught when I saw that Rachel Hewitt’s HEPI Policy Note on “Measuring well-being in higher education” (May 2019) featured one. One axis is “mental wellbeing” and the other is “mental ill-health”. This is interesting, implying that the two are entirely distinct categories, when I suspect that most people would assume that the one goes in step with the other. So the matrix quadrant of “optimal mental wellbeing” and “maximal mental ill-health” conjures up a consultation on the lines of:

Psychiatrist: “Good morning, how are you feeling today?”

Patient: “Absolutely great, thank you, doctor!”

Psychiatrist: “So, let’s continue our discussion of your feelings of worthlessness and alienation…”

I’m not saying that the two categories are not in fact separate – I don’t have the expertise to make a claim either way – but the HEPI note, saying that mental ill-health requires “dedicated interventions” whereas lack of wellbeing needs “generalised resources”, doesn’t help me much in grasping the distinction being drawn here. The HEPI note then encourages universities to measure wellbeing so that “we can better understand the long-term trends in the health of those in the higher education sector” with a view to reducing “the likelihood of mental illness”. So the two are it seems, after all, linked in some way. There goes the nice two-by-two matrix then, if mental wellbeing and mental health are actually on a continuum.

So what about measuring wellbeing? There’s a good bit of this going on, by ONS (“On a scale of 0 to 10, how anxious did you feel yesterday?”) and the Student Academic Experience Survey, with an impressive sample size of 14,000. This apparently produced in 2017 a positive response to a “Life worthwhile?” question from just 19% of students – a figure which the HEPI note doesn’t seem to think worth remarking on. Are we really saying that only 19% of students think that their lives are worthwhile? This deeply implausible finding – which might perhaps be explained by respondents interpreting the question as something like, “Could your life be improved in same way?” – is thrown into even greater doubt when it turns out that the DLHE data for graduates has 80% of them answering “high” or “very high” to a “Life worthwhile?” question (and most of the rest give a “medium” answer).

“Not everyone”, goes on the HEPI note, “is keen on the increased collection of well-being measures.” Well, no, if the data are as all over the place as these are. But one key reason apparently given for not collecting wellbeing data is a concern that universities will then be judged on a measure over which they have no control. True, they do not have control over their students’ wellbeing, and nor should they have. Where is the evidence that students define themselves wholly as “students”, rather than individuals who happen to be students and a mass of other things besides? A negative answer to a wellbeing question could just as much reflect the breakup of a relationship, seeing Nigel Farage on TV, or watching Arsenal play, as it has to do with the university. The HEPI note argues the other way, saying that “We cannot make improvements in the delivery of higher education if we do not understand our weaknesses” – the assumption being that the factors that cause poor mental wellbeing are “weaknesses” to be found somewhere in the university, susceptible to management interventions. Universities can try to improve their NSS scores by providing feedback more promptly, or whatever, because students have themselves defined the problem precisely: “We want faster feedback”. No such precision can be available to help improve wellbeing, as your idea of wellbeing may be completely different to mine. Universities should instead do what they are supposed to do – using their resources to create a community which supports the best teaching and research that it can achieve – and allow students to build mental resilience in their own ways by drawing on the intellectual resources that should be on offer to them.

SRHE member Paul Temple, Centre for Higher Education Studies, UCL Institute of Education, University College London.