One afternoon while I was studying for my doctoral comprehensive exam, my mother called, sobbing, to tell me that someone I loved dearly had been killed in Baghdad. It happened after the U.S. invasion of Iraq — one of many incidents inhumanely labeled “collateral damage.” I quickly ended the conversation and went for a walk, picked up red nail polish from a supermarket, and ordered Chinese food takeout.
With hindsight, it’s clear I went into a dissociative state — an unconscious break in the normal connection between my thoughts, memories, feelings, actions, and sense of self. I behaved as if nothing had happened. I continued to study for my exam and “show up” to work in my lab. I studied for hours each day, but I was dismayed when I failed to recall what I’d learned the previous day. I remember wondering: Why can’t I retain or apply the information? I scolded myself: “I need to stop being lazy and work harder.”
Not surprisingly, a few months later I failed my exam. I was devastated, embarrassed, and scared. I apologized to my professors for wasting their time and the university’s resources. Luckily, my graduate program offered a retake. I wasn’t sure I should try again because I was convinced that something had happened to me neurologically that prevented me from learning. I told my family that I was thinking about dropping out of graduate school; I argued that I no longer had the intellectual capacity to become a scientist: “I must have become stupid over the years,” I told my mom. Self-defeatism was a logical explanation for the decline I thought I was experiencing in my cognitive ability to retain — let alone apply — even the simplest of information.
Today, 17 years later, having completed my doctoral and postdoctoral training, I teach undergraduates, coordinate a teaching center, and conduct research on stress and learning. What I now know: The trauma of that shocking loss very likely caused my brain to become hijacked by strong negative emotions and slowed my prefrontal cortex — where motivation, decision-making, and problem solving are located.
I was reminded of my graduate-school hardships when Covid-19 hit the United States. Many colleges and universities began to offer webinars for faculty members on trauma-informed teaching during the pandemic. I participated in some of those webinars and facilitated many. They were long overdue, given the prevalence of trauma and stress among students before the pandemic. Faculty participants often expressed relief after these webinars: They appreciated understanding that the mental fogginess, exhaustion, and disconnect they’d been experiencing this year were a typical physiological response to an atypical situation.
Seeing their reaction, I began to wonder: Who is educating our students about traumatic stress and its impact on their learning and well-being?
In my own courses at an Arizona community college, at least 50 percent of my students lost their jobs last year. Many were breadwinners trying to hold it together for their families, yet most kept showing up to class to try to learn. In a national #RealCollege 2020 survey of 195,000 students, nearly three in five reported experiencing food insecurity, housing insecurity, or homelessness at least once in the past year. I began to offer webinars on stress and anxiety for my students and in April 2020 led a series of campuswide sessions on the topic. Much like the faculty participants, the students who attended these webinars were grateful to understand the physiology behind what they were feeling: that, for example, binge-watching Netflix did not mean they were lazy or apathetic; rather, it was a coping mechanism. Among the comments they emailed to me:
- This workshop “helped me to feel like I am normal and that it’s OK to feel these things.”
- “I feel bad for wasting my [math] professor’s time,” wrote one student, expressing remorse for not doing well in their course.
- “I know I am not stupid, but these unprecedented times make it difficult to focus and learn.”
Reading such comments took me back to that lonely period when I feared I didn’t belong in graduate school and should quit. How are we failing our students today by not helping them understand the connections between stress, emotions, and learning? Why aren’t we teaching undergraduates about trauma, self-regulation, and mental health? Especially when research on stress and its impact on learning tells us that we can learn to regulate how we deal with adversity and, thus, mitigate its impact on our ability to engage and learn.
Critical to this endeavor of self-regulation is helping students to recognize that they are not alone, develop self-awareness, and learn about their nervous system. Their importance is captured in this comment from a colleague’s student: “Knowing that I am not the only one with confusion … made me feel that I am not alone at this moment.” Awareness that other students are also struggling can help alleviate that feeling of loneliness and helplessness.
The pandemic “caused a great amount of stress, if not trauma,” said Sara Goldrick-Rab, a professor of sociology and medicine at Temple University and founder of a research center focused on students’ basic needs for food and housing, in an email interview. “The pain associated with trauma is often undefined yet can have a powerful negative impact on the success and well-being of students.”
Trauma profoundly challenges students’ self-concept and can affect their self-acceptance, self-image, and self-esteem. To pre-emptively educate students about how stress can interfere with their sense of self is to empower them to protect themselves, said Gloria Niles, director of distance education and coordinator of the professional-development office at the University of Hawai’i–West O’ahu. “Understanding the basic functions of the brain,” she said in an email interview, “helps students recognize and delineate their self-identity as a learner from their emotional, psychological, and neurological responses to extraneous factors.”
This essay is a plea for colleges and universities to start — and sustain — proactive, holistic mental-health programs for students. Such initiatives are not merely about the effects of the pandemic, and go beyond trauma-informed teaching and learning. I am calling for higher education to cultivate our moral imagination where every student is seen, where we invest in the well-being of the whole student, and where we ground all of our work in an ethics of care.
A holistic approach to students’ mental health includes preventative as well as reactive, interventive components. The proactive component entails, in part, validating and empowering students by teaching them about their neurobiology. We want our students to have a growth mind-set — to view failure as an opportunity to learn and grow. We want to cultivate an awareness that when something blocks their learning — such as stress — it isn’t permanent, and it doesn’t define them.
Let me put it another way. If we were in a clinical setting and we knew it would help diabetic patients to learn about their blood sugar — how to recognize what triggers its fluctuation and then regulate it — and we didn’t equip them with that knowledge, we would be doing them harm. In much the same way, we need to accept that many students come to us with a pre-existing mental illness (acknowledged or not) and need help understanding how stress or trauma may trigger their symptoms. Given how mental illnesses are stigmatized, we need to assure students that they are not defined by their condition any more than someone living with diabetes is defined by that disease.
When students experience traumatic stress, it can limit their sense of agency and perpetuate unconscious beliefs about how learning works — for example, that intelligence is predetermined. A student struggling to complete an assignment may readily adopt a self-deficit interpretation (e.g., “I must be stupid”) versus a more self-compassionate understanding (e.g., “I am experiencing a lot of stress. My lack of motivation is not because I am lazy but because I am coping”). We have a moral obligation to help students see the distinction between those two interpretations, especially when the culture in higher education has long marginalized the essential role of emotions and emotional well-being in learning. Our work must intentionally and explicitly normalize asking for help. When students need help, including mental-health support, and don’t seek it, we all suffer.
What’s required is a systematic approach to students’ mental health and well-being, with an infrastructure that students can readily access on campus, well before the need becomes dire. A report published in January by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine reached that same conclusion: Higher education, it says, needs “to take comprehensive, campuswide approaches to more effectively address mental health and substance-use problems among students and to develop cultures that support well-being.”
Noshene E. Ranjbar, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Arizona and director of its Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Clinic, said in an email interview that an integrative approach to mental health “utilizes a bio-psycho-socio-spiritual framework to gather information and help the student understand their mental-health struggle in context of their whole self.” Students need more than a number to a counselor they can contact when they are feeling distress. We need to interview and listen to students. A holistic approach to mental health, she said “must be strength-based, trauma-informed, culturally sensitive, meeting the student where they are at.”
For all of our talk about student success, persistence, and retention, we have fallen short of supporting students in a way they need to be supported and empowered. This mental-health work is not solely the purview of faculty members who, in fact, want more guidance on how to help students on this front. Nor is this work the sole responsibility of campus counseling or student-affairs deans. Mental health is an institutional issue. It is a societal issue. It is an equity and justice issue. Mental health is a human-rights issue. Moving forward, we in higher education can’t afford shortcuts. It takes a village to advocate for restoring and maintaining mental well-being. Below, I offer a few approaches and initiatives for colleges and universities to consider:
First, do a self-study. To understand what your campus already is offering, answer the following questions:
- How much of your institution’s budget is designated toward mental health? Is mental health one of the top budget priorities for your institution?
- Do you have a team of experts working on a holistic, culturally competent plan? Does the team include students?
- Is your team reaching out to local practitioners?
- Is your institution’s mental-health plan aligned with equity and inclusion initiatives? Does your plan deal with intergenerational trauma? Traumas associated with oppression and racialization?
- Do you have patient advocates and an active chaplaincy who are trained in cultural humility? Do your campus police officers receive culturally sensitive mental-health training?
- Are your faculty members trained and empowered to work with campus therapists or counselors to advocate for their students?
- Have you hired an adequate number of therapists to ensure that their work doesn’t fall on the shoulders of a select few?
Answers to such questions will help determine whether or not your institution is taking an integrative, proactive approach to student well-being.
Start your holistic approach with new students. Create a foundation by offering orientation sessions for incoming students on the neurobiology of learning and on how they can explore their optimal learning environment. Emphasize that learning is social and emotional. Be mindful not to suffocate students with “toxic positivity” nor to valorize grit. Normalize the idea that stress can feel overwhelming, and support students with evidence-based tools to deal with the stress and trauma.
Organize additional mental-health events throughout the year. Such events should build on what students learned at orientation — for example, teaching students about the autonomic nervous system; about stress and trauma; about sleep, movement, and wellness; and about how to regulate and protect emotions. Encourage students to continue to learn about the brain and how the brain is flexible and can work in our favor when we train it to do so. Start a campaign to encourage students to invite their family members to attend one of the mental-health events at your institution.
Invite faculty members to offer a first-year seminar on learning, emotions, trauma, and healing. Here’s an example of one proposed at the University of Michigan. Encourage professors to collaborate on the seminar with local experts to introduce students to the concepts of self-regulation and community healing, and help them learn how to negotiate with their brain and act as an “amygdala whisperer.” Such seminars present an opportunity to destigmatize mental health and learn more about how different cultures (for example, Indigenous communities) approach healing. Incorporate into the curriculum capstone projects in which students become mental-health and wellness ambassadors, helping educate their peers and others on the campus.
Hold a campuswide mental-health symposium every month. Use it to normalize mental-health care, to explicitly destigmatize mental illness, and to discuss its connection to equity and inclusion. Talk about potential sources of trauma — including high-stakes exams, proctoring, food and housing insecurity, and marginalization and oppression. Do a “show and tell” where you walk participants through how to seek mental-health support: How can they contact a therapist? A psychiatrist? What do they do if they can’t afford the medication? Does your campus or city offer emergency funds? How can students apply and qualify for it? What telephone number do they call if they are experiencing grief or anxiety? Suicide ideation? How can they best help friends or colleagues in need? Invite the audience to program a 1-800 crisis hotline number into their phones.
Those five ideas are far from an exhaustive list. I invite you to share additional suggestions with me on Twitter using the hashtag: #holisticmentalhealthhighered.
I often think of my years in graduate school. I wish I’d known then about the effects of trauma so I could have understood what I was experiencing. I wouldn’t have felt like I had to endure my crippling anxiety alone, in silence. I write this essay because I don’t want students today to endure a similar crisis alone, in silence.
When we welcome students to our institutions, we are investing in humanity’s future by helping them develop intellectually and socially. But part of our work should also be about helping them develop emotionally, nourishing their self-efficacy, and guiding them on how to deal with the inevitable challenges they will face in their lives. As Desmond Tutu’s teaching reminds us: “My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours. We belong in a bundle of life. We say a person is a person through other persons.” When students suffer, we all suffer.
Additional mental-health resources to consider sharing on your campus:
