SUBJECT: Provost Roundtable Series - Mental Health Panel

Supporting Each Other Through Mental Health Challenges

Please join us on Thursday, December 1st  at 11:00 a.m. at the Mardigian Library (1st floor) as our colleagues  present their research and insights on this important topic.

Please register, as space is limited.

Our Roundtable Panelists

Grace Helms-Kotre, HHS, Lecturer
As an instructor of stress management, I have the privilege of regularly interacting with students around the topics of stress, mental health, and well-being. I hear students share about their stress in managing current responsibilities - balancing work and financial needs, expectations of their families, academic pressures, planning for the future, and navigating the challenging social-political-economic contexts of their lives. This stress has become toxic for many students. Faculty and staff are also experiencing high levels of stress and burnout. There are many things we can do on the personal level to challenge stress, and I am often inspired to see students take empowered steps toward their own resilience by practicing stress management techniques. But our collective stress is not solvable purely on an individual level. We must continue to make the wellness of our entire community a priority not only in words but also in actions. During this roundtable event, I will share about specific practices we can engage in toward personal and collective well-being to mitigate toxic stress and take steps toward a more just and care-centered future.

Caleb Siefert, Associate Professor of Psychology
Mental health professionals of all types study how people experience and adapt to stressors. Research suggests that adaptive management of large-scale stressors differs from navigating daily hassles. The Covid-19 pandemic is a large-scale stressor that has shifted how many of us experience key aspects of our lives. Historically, two clinical approaches have been employed the help people adapt to ongoing stressors. The first focus on increasing awareness of resources and tools that promote coping.  The second focuses on clarifying what the individual can and cannot control and how to find meaning and value in their actions during stress. Considering our own narratives (and those thrust upon us) can be a useful process to alter how we give meaning to our stress. Today, clinicians seek to employ both methods in conjunction.  In other words, when a shift in how we frame our stress is paired with an increase in awareness of the resources and tools that can help us adapt to stress, we manage better than when we rely solely on one or the other.  In short, having and understanding of what helps us manage stress seems to be most useful when we are thoughtful about the story we tell ourselves about the meaning of stress.

Pam Aronson, Professor of Sociology 
The pandemic has had pervasive implications for our students and will continue to do so in the future. The new level of economic insecurity and uncertainty that characterizes the current period has already had negative consequences for the educational aspirations, attainments, future career trajectories, and well-being. Young adults in particular have deepening mental health problems and we have been seeing this with our students. Inequalities in the transition to adulthood, already problematic before the pandemic, have deepened. Our students, who are disproportionately first generation, working class, and from immigrant families, are especially vulnerable to these challenges. Based on my research on the transition to adulthood during the pandemic and UM-Dearborn’s disadvantaged students, I will explain how the larger social context has the potential to profoundly impact our students, especially those who are the most vulnerable. Based on my research on Gen Z and social media, this presentation will also consider the theme of generational conflict and mistrust (that is, how young adults view educational institutions and professors). Taken together, this research suggests that we need systematic and consistent methods of supporting students, who are very much dependent on institutions during this critical period of life.

Sara Byczek, Director of CAPS
The University of Michigan Dearborn has participated in the Healthy Minds Survey four times between 2017 and 2021. This nationally recognized online survey examines mental health, service utilization, and related issues among undergraduate and graduate students. It also allows participating colleges to compare their scores on certain areas to other participating colleges with similar demographics and enrollment. The Healthy Minds Survey and participation in the JED program has provided hundreds of pages of data that CAPS has utilized to assist in expanding programming and services. In this presentation I will review key findings from the Healthy Minds data and how CAPS has been working to address these areas of concerns. I will also provide suggestions for what we can do as members of the campus community to help support student mental health.

Amy Brainer, Associate Professor and Director of WGST
My comments affirm those offered by several others on this panel in calling for a less individualistic approach to mental health. Recently someone said to me: “Self-care is the new ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps.’” This simple statement is a smart critique: it points out the commercialization of self-care; the stratification of mental health services (wealthy people get more); and the fact that people are often blamed for their own mental health outcomes. Personal actions matter, but mental health (and emotional and spiritual health) are a community responsibility. The recent Washington Post article by William Wan, “What if Yale finds out?” is one of many examples of just how far institutions will go to shift this burden of responsibility onto students. I see this panel as working against a ‘bootstraps’ approach to self-care and mental health. In this spirit, I want to center community-specific forms of care and love that are essential work in higher ed. I will focus in particular on LGBTQ+ communities and chosen families during (and beyond) the COVID-19 pandemic. I also acknowledge and draw inspiration from the roots of self-care as a more political and collective concept in Black feminist thought and activism.

Lisa Martin, Interim Chair, HHS and Professor of Health Policy Studies and   WGST
In my Social Construction of Mental Illness class, students do a PhotoVoice class project, which is a participatory-action research methodology for researching complex aspects of people’s experience and telling stories around those experiences. The prompt for this assignment is to explore one of the following two questions - Is my community promoting mental well-being or mental illness? OR How is mental illness stigmatized in my community?  Many students choose our campus as the community that they explore. In addition to identifying possible stressors and problems, students must also propose policy changes to address the content of their photos. In my presentation I’ll share some insights of class projects over the last several years of teaching the class and highlight some of the collective actions they’ve proposed. I’ll also share how these projects have impacted my own teaching practices and informed one of my class sessions for the week leading into midterms - a unit called radical self-care where the class prepares for the upcoming stress that midterms will inevitably bring.

Patrick Beauchesne, Associate Professor of Anthropology
and Director of Foundations
My hope is that my presentation will leave all of you with some measure of hope, as well as feeling supported and seen.  The state of mental health in academia, for everyone involved, is rather grim. While I will explore this context, as it is important to recognize, I will do my best to not dwell on it, or make it seem like we have no way out. Rather, I will attempt to argue that we have agency and we have many avenues to push back against a culture that overworks and undervalues us. So ultimately, I have two goals with this presentation: 1) To help open up the conversation on our campus so that we can begin to destigmatize talking about stress and mental health; and 2) To generate a discussion about how we can begin to support each other and push back against a culture that valorizes ‘productivity’ in academia, despite the costs to our mental health, our families, our friends, and of the other joys in life that keep us whole, happy, and human.

Finn Bell, Assistant Professor of Human Services
As many of my colleagues have affirmed, the larger community impacts our mental well-being. This includes not just our immediate campus community but also the wider society and environment. Based on a workshop that I co-designed and facilitated for the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) on the Ann Arbor campus, “Teaching in tumultuous times: Making choices about how to address the world beyond your classroom,” I will briefly present on the importance of acknowledging and addressing larger events and ongoing societal stressors that impact student learning. Using the example of climate anxiety, I will then discuss the importance of cultivating hope, for all of us, as both a means of reasserting agency, an essential component of mental health, and a necessary precursor for social change. I will briefly discuss qualitative research that I completed with workers at a Catholic eco-justice center. They had three primary strategies for coping with the difficult emotions that came up in regard to our environmental crises: (1) taking action, (2) finding community, and (3) practicing spirituality. I will close by discussing implications from this research for the classroom and the broader campus environment.

Nehal Patel, Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology
and Criminal Justice
Much of my work as of late has been about what set of values would underlie a legal regime in which people’s well-being is prioritized.  Although limited to discussion of law and legal systems, many of the underlying challenges I write about are similar across many social institutions.  There currently is a Mindfulness-in-Law movement quietly happening across the country, in which legislators, judges, and police officers have implemented mindfulness practices into their courtrooms and departments.  My assessment is that this largely has been for the better, but the benefits of mindfulness practices must be applied at the interpersonal, organizational, community, and structural levels of society along with the individual level.  In a society whose mode of production prizes profit, productivity and efficiency, an “individual level only” approach to mindfulness runs the risk of becoming merely a strategy to create better “worker bees” rather than having as an end a population that flourishes with wellness.  I will give a brief introduction to some of the core concepts from mindfulness-based dharmic thought traditions that I think can foster a multi-level shift toward environments of well-being. 

Professor Patel will guide a short meditation in conclusion of the panel.