Recap: Supporting Students’ Mental Health

Students are struggling (and instructors are overwhelmed). Here are a few tangible things we can do--without burning out.

In a room packed with instructors, staff, and students on March 27, CETL convened a discussion on how we can best support students’ mental health, particularly given the stark data unearthed in the 2021 Healthy Minds Survey. Nearly half (46%) of University of Mississippi students met the criteria for depression in that study, with 25% of students meeting the definition of major depression. Other big-picture trends from that survey include:

• Anxiety disorder: 39%

• Eating disorder: 18%

• Non-suicidal self-injury (last year): 28%

• Suicidal ideation (last year): 16%

• Psychiatric medication: 33%

• Mental health therapy/counseling (last year): 27%

When asked to estimate how many days in the previous week that emotional or mental difficulties had impacted their academic performance, students gave equally alarming information: 

Given this challenging landscape, then, how can instructors create learning environments that acknowledge the mental health challenges of students and that support learning?

We shared several strategies that instructors can keep in mind, summarized briefly below. You can also review the slides from our presentation here. If you’d like to talk more about strategies you can employ, CETL staff are happy to engage in a consultation or conversation. If you’re a UM instructor, you can request one of those by filling out this form.

Photo by Pixabay

Take care of yourself: One of the best ways you can care for students is to ensure that you are healthy. The rationale is simple: If you lack the emotional or cognitive bandwidth to manage your own stress, you won’t have the resources to co-regulate your students’ stress. Taking care of yourself might include seeking out the services of the University Counseling Center, which employees can use for mental health support, or engaging the Employee Assistance Program for either counseling or referral. Ensuring you’re getting quality (and enough) sleep, engaging in wellness practices, and considering how you enforce boundaries around your work are all important to being available for your students.

Cultivate awareness about your students: The most important thing you can do—after taking care of yourself—is to remember that your students are humans with complex lives and their own constellation of challenges. Remember that the people you’re working with are human beings, not human doings. Think about how you can express care through the norms and communication strategies you establish in your classes. This doesn’t require huge change; awareness is the most important step.

Challenge your assumptions: You’re likely to observe student behaviors and make assumptions about why they’re behaving as they are. This is human nature and unavoidable—literally, you cannot stop your brain from engaging in this. What you can do, though, is make an effort to pause, observe, and interrupt the assumptions you’re making before they begin to leak out in your nonverbal communication. 

No matter how good of an actor you think you are, your judgments of others inevitably transmit. Think about it: Do you get a spidey sense when someone else is judging you? Of course you do. The only way to prevent this with students is to interrupt the judgment. This is very hard, but it’s critically important.

(Incidentally, positive emotions transmit, too. This article is fascinating.)

Remember students do things for reasons: In an Inside Higher Ed piece, Megan Thiele writes: “There are professors who believe students are lazy, can’t be trusted and don’t deserve their empathy. Yet Devon Price reminds us that laziness doesn’t exist. There are always reasons for a student’s behavior.” 

Consider your syllabus: When crafting your syllabus, use warm language while setting high expectations (see the “warm demander” quadrant on this chart). Make clear to students that you care, regardless of their performance. Whenever possible, decrease or eliminate high-stakes assessments. Structure is important, particularly for students who struggle with executive functioning, but flexibility also helps students who are experiencing mental health challenges. 

Create a shadow syllabus: Sonya Huber developed a powerful “shadow syllabus” of things that are rarely communicated explicitly with students, even though they would be served by knowing them. You can read her shadow syllabus here.

Honor requested accommodations: Common accommodations for students experiencing mental health challenges include flexible attendance policies, extra time on assignments/exams, alternate testing formats, and preferential seating. Because not all students have the economic resources or social capital necessary to navigate the complicated processes to obtain official accommodations, consider offering flexibility and support even when a student does not have Student Disability Services documentation.

Refer, refer, refer: Karen Costa writes and speaks about creating a scope of practice. The goal of a scope of practice is to articulate clearly what our sphere of work will include. Karen asks, “What is mine?” and, importantly, what is not. You can use her template to engage in a reflective activity around your own scope of work, which we strongly encourage.