College faculty members and staff have long complained about low pay, ever-expanding responsibilities, and unengaged students. A new, groundbreaking study says the demands of their jobs are taking a toll on their mental health.
The survey, released in October by the Healthy Minds Network, a research organization focused on adolescent and young-adult mental health, paints a grim picture of what it’s like to work in higher education. More than half of respondents said that over the past year, their job took a negative toll on their mental or emotional health. Nearly six in 10 said they felt burnt out because of their work. Half said they needed help for emotional or mental-health problems such as feeling sad, blue, anxious, or nervous, over the previous year.
In response to questions to assess the prevalence of mental-health problems, 16 percent of respondents screened positively for symptoms of depression in the previous two weeks, 15 percent screened positively for anxiety, and 8 percent were deemed likely to have an eating disorder. Five percent of respondents said they had thought about or planned suicide over the past year.
Still, faculty and staff appeared to be doing better than students in those areas. In the survey of students, more than one-third showed symptoms of anxiety, and almost four in 10 showed symptoms of moderate or severe depression.
Conversely, 57 percent of faculty and staff were rated as having positive mental health, compared to only 38 percent of students.
The group behind the Healthy Minds Survey, one of the largest studies of student mental health in the country, turned its attention to faculty and staff members this year for the third year in a row. The study is intended to help institutions identify needs and priorities, benchmark against peer institutions, and evaluate programs and policies, among other goals.
Although the researchers had been thinking about studying faculty members for some time, hearing about how faculty and staff supported students during the pandemic prompted them to take action, said Sarah Ketchen Lipson, a principal investigator on the project and an associate professor at Boston University School of Public Health.
“There is such a need to be collecting this data from faculty and staff because there really hasn’t been much data to understand their mental-health needs and their experience with supporting students,” Lipson said.
The most recent survey, conducted last academic year, received 9,970 responses from 30 colleges across the country. About two-thirds of the respondents were staff and 33 percent were faculty members. The colleges included two-year and four-year, public and private institutions, and represented most regions of the country.
The survey asked faculty and staff members how they felt about supporting students. More than eight in 10 said they felt comfortable talking with students about their mental health, while more than nine in 10 said they had a good idea of how to recognize a student in emotional or mental distress. But more than 30 percent said that supporting students in emotional or mental distress has taken a toll on their own mental or emotional health.
There is such a need to be collecting this data from faculty and staff because there really hasn’t been much data to understand their mental-health needs and their experience with supporting students.
Lipson said she was struck by the willingness of faculty and staff to support students, even though they may not always know how to help. “When I’m talking to a decision-maker at a college campus, I’ll say we probably overestimate resistance from faculty in terms of their role in student mental health,” she said. “They’re already playing a role. They already know it’s important, and many of them are already stepping up to play an important part.” Even more faculty members are open to learning and building their skills in this area, she said, and only a small group resist the idea altogether. That means colleges can help a lot of students by focusing their efforts on the faculty and staff who are open to supporting students, she said.
“We need to bring this training and skill building into faculty’s daily lives and routines,” Lipson said. “So rather than requiring faculty to proactively go and do a training that’s not otherwise part of their daily routine, we can embed these trainings and skill-building into department faculty meetings and other kinds of existing spaces that signal to the faculty this is important.”
Lipson said the survey found some notable differences among faculty in terms of supporting students’ mental-health needs. Female, transgender, and nonbinary faculty members were more likely to report having had a one-on-one conversation with a student about their mental health, for example. Those faculty members were also more likely to say that supporting students’ mental health had taken a toll on their own.
The survey also found that faculty members in disciplines where students indicated they were least likely to access mental-health services, such as engineering, business, and hard sciences, were less likely to say that they had conversations with students about their mental-health needs. Those findings point to “an opportunity for tailored intervention, outreach, education, skill-building in these disciplines where both students and faculty are less likely to be talking about mental health or be knowledgeable about mental health,” Lipson said.
Faculty and staff members also said that their institutions prioritize students’ mental and emotional health more than their own. Nearly nine in 10 faculty and staff members agreed that students’ mental and emotional health are a priority at their institutions, while six in 10 said those issues for faculty and staff are a priority at their institution.
