This essay is excerpted from a new Chronicle special report, “Overcoming Student Loneliness,” available here.
Some faculty members carry a heavy burden in caring for students’ mental health, a burden that goes beyond teaching. These front-line faculty members, as I call them, have close contact with students and are therefore in a position to notice — and do something about — their mental-health struggles. Such instructors tend to be the people whom students turn to first for help or advice.
It’s an immense emotional weight. Two ways to lighten that load are by creating “student mental-health communities” in your classroom and by holding group office hours. I’ll explore each option in turn.
Mental-health communities. With this approach, your students can learn to trust one another with their mental-health struggles, relieving the burden on you. You are no longer the only person they come to for assistance — especially when the help they’re seeking is just a nonjudgmental ear. But you must cultivate these communities and the trust they’re founded upon. Here’s how I began to create that culture in my own classroom.
During the fall semester of 2021, tragedy struck our campus in the form of multiple student suicides and suicide attempts. During our first class meeting after another student death, the air was full of tension and grief. I knew that the ethical thing to do was to directly acknowledge these tragedies. For me, that meant sharing my own story, in particular, about the depression I had dealt with most recently. I stood in the front of the room, facing my seminar students. I started by asking, with a smile, “Do you guys Google your professors? Like, have you Googled me?”
They shook their heads. I was incredulous. “Man, if I were in school now, I would Google all of my professors.” I laughed, but I was also serious. When I was a student 20 years ago, doing research on my professors’ identities was much harder than it is now. I’d hoped that at least some of them would have looked up my name on the internet. What I was about to say would have been so much easier if they had already known about my mental disability.
Instead, I had to start cold: “I want to talk to you about mental health after everything that has happened over the past few days.”
One student was making eye contact with me while his fingers were moving on his laptop keyboard. I nodded at him and smiled, “Are you Googling me now?” We both laughed. Of course he was. “Good,” I said to him. “Everything I’m about to tell you is out there.”
I waved my hand to encompass out there. On the internet, there was plenty of public information about my mental disabilities — in stories I’d written, in interviews I’d given, in tweets, Instagram posts, and more. In fact, outside the walls of our institution, I’d been very open about my mental disabilities.
Even so, I was nervous about what I was about to say. I leaned back against the whiteboard: “I have bipolar disorder and I’m autistic. A while ago, I nearly died by suicide. And sometimes, I get severely depressed.” As a contingent faculty member, I was worried that my students would think less of me, that I would lose credibility as a professor, and that all of the things I knew to be true about the stigma against mental disability in higher education would harm my relationship with my students.
Margaret Price writes in her 2011 book Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, “Persons with mental disabilities are presumed not to be competent, nor understandable, nor valuable, nor whole. … The failure to make sense, as measured against and by those with ‘normal’ minds, means a loss of personhood.” I had never stood in front of my own students and told them I was mentally disabled. What if everything went wrong?
I continued, telling the story of how I almost hadn’t been their professor that fall because I’d been so depressed over the summer. But a professor who’d been scheduled to teach my class in my place backed out right before the semester started. “So the law school reached out to me at the last minute,” I told my students. “I felt healthy again, and here I am.”
By talking about my own recent depression, I wanted to show my students how stigma is such a powerful thing that it instills fear in the hearts of the stigmatized, even among those who know that mental disability is nothing to be ashamed of — like me.
“Your lives are impossible right now,” I said. “I’m so sorry. There are people who want to help you, and I’m one of them. You can always come to me. I know what it’s like to feel like everything is dark. I promise.” Then I stopped talking at them and asked if anyone had any questions. “Even really personal ones,” I joked.
I waited for a while, giving my students plenty of space to think. Eventually, one student said, with deep sincerity, “Thank you.” There were murmurs of agreement.
After class, two students hung around and thanked me in private for sharing my story. Then, a few days later, I received a direct message from a student, printed here with permission: “I just wanted to thank you again for being vulnerable with us last week. If those in positions of power, leadership, etc., over us aren’t vulnerable to talk about hard things, then why would we ever be?”
The student’s words evoked what I had tried to do in class: to show my own vulnerability so that they could see that being vulnerable need not be scary under the proper circumstances, and that it might even be helpful. I tried to create an environment that fought back against stigma, one in which students could feel comfortable talking with one another even if they did not feel comfortable talking with me.
After that day, and for the rest of the semester, I collaborated with my students on ways to make the course logistically easier for them. The course remained intellectually demanding, but my students did not have to fret about, for example, whether the intricacies of our institution’s course-management software were going to trip them up.
Not every contingent professor can disclose their mental disabilities the way I did. In fact, I have, over and over, advised against disclosing mental disabilities in the workplace, especially in higher education, unless you have bulletproof job security. For all of the reasons that Margaret Price described, most people should not reveal such information at work. Higher education, as an institution, is not yet a place inclusive enough for faculty members to disclose their mental disabilities.
But even if you do not share your personal story (or if you do not have one to share), you can still talk about mental health with your students. And you can take steps to create a mental-health community within the context of your class. I recommend doing a “mental-health acknowledgment” every class meeting, for no more than two or three minutes. These acknowledgments will become easier to do with repetition, for you and for your students:
- Start by saying something like: “I want to acknowledge those of you who are struggling right now. If you are, it is real. It is hard, and I’m sorry.” Just saying the words out loud can do a lot for your students by showing that you see them.
- The next class meeting, say the words again. After you finish speaking, be silent, giving your students time to think. Then ask: “What has been hard on the campus these past few days?” With that question, you aren’t asking your students to pour out their hearts about personal stuff. You’re asking a general question about life on the campus. Wait for a response — it might take longer than you think because most students are unaccustomed to talking about mental-health topics.
- Finally, start the next class meeting with a simple acknowledgment, followed by a check-in. Give an honest description of your mental-health situation, and then ask, “How are you doing?” If there are campus events or crises that deserve attention, talk about them directly. Then give students space to speak. Don’t worry — you are not running a group-therapy session — just a place where students can talk about hard things and taboo subjects.
By creating an inclusive space — a classroom that celebrates mental disability and supports mental-health struggles — you create a space in which you and your students can push back against the stigma that stops people from seeking help for their mental-health struggles.
In the end, having a classwide discussion about the mental-health struggles that your students may face will very likely decrease the number of students who need to come talk to you in private. Not only are you giving them space to share their worries in class, but you will also have cultivated a supportive community among them. You are showing students that they are not alone in how they are feeling. They have each other.
Group office hours. Another good option that will benefit both you and your students is to hold group, rather than individual, office hours, either online or in person. Sarah J. Schendel, an associate professor of academic support at Suffolk University Law School, has pointed out that individual office hours (in particular, online) can intimidate some students, and she suggests offering group office hours.
Offering group office hours online can facilitate the mental-health community you’re seeking to create in your classroom. It can also build bonds between your students and reduce the amount of time you spend in office hours since you aren’t meeting with them individually.
Alexa Z. Chew, a clinical professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, used Zoom to hold chat sessions with past and present students during the pandemic. She emailed her students to announce that she would meet with them in groups ranging in size from two to eight. They could sign up via meeting software. The spots quickly filled.
Students across all years wanted to chat with her. Within the larger-sized groups, some students chose not to speak but listened to others share their stories. In the smaller-sized groups, students could have Chew’s close attention. In the end, her students were able to build community by meeting one another in a nonclassroom environment. The chats enabled them to create valuable connections at a time when connections were hard to come by.
When you nurture a mental-health community among your students, you give them others to turn to besides you. And you create a new, more powerful front line, made up of fellow students who trust one another, forming an interlocking web of support.
This essay was adapted from a new book, A Light in the Tower: A New Reckoning With Mental Health in Higher Education (University Press of Kansas).
