UP Teaching & Learning Community Blog

mental health

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Cognitive Distortions and Irrational Beliefs: Students, Faculty, and Finals

a woman looking at a penguin in an aquarium As we approach final exams, and wrap up an academic year’s worth of blogging on student mental health, many of us feel an accentuated sense of stress and anxiety. That is normal, and sometimes even healthy – stress, in reasonable quantities, is an adaptive response to improve motivation and performance. But many of us also see students approach finals in unhealthy ways – where the subjective feeling of stress is beyond any rational appraisal. Might there be little things we can do as faculty and academic staff to re-frame finals?

Though there is no magic solution, I often find myself talking to students this time of year about some simple cognitive-behavioral techniques to manage stress. Cognitive methods in psychology focus on identifying and challenging dysfunctional thoughts and beliefs to change subjective feelings. Though in-depth versions of these methods can be part of serious psychotherapy, simple versions are often popular parts of reasonable self-help techniques. They can work because the types of cognitive distortions and irrational beliefs we experience are remarkably common and consistent: we all sometimes “catastrophize” (exaggerate the critical importance of things like one bad exam) or engage in “all-or-nothing thinking” (see our work as either great or terrible with nothing in-between).

Sometimes just recognizing those types of thoughts, and providing some evidence to refute those thoughts, can help mitigate our negative emotional reactions. Sometimes, in other words, students might benefit from a little perspective on finals.

It’s worth noting that a little perspective is not enough for students with more serious mental health concerns – we should avoid minimizing real distress, and keep referring students in need to UP’s counseling services. But we might simultaneously be able to chip away at some of the common cognitive distortions and irrational thoughts that can go into overdrive for any student around finals week at UP. Here are just a few examples:

“If I don’t get a good grade on this final, my parents are going to kill me.” This is an easy one for the obviousness of its irrationality; the parents of our students love their children, and while they may express that love in different ways it never involves capital punishment!

“This final is going to be impossible.” Technically, an impossible final would be one that no one can pass. I know of no class at UP that fails every student. Sometimes students just need a friendly reminder that many students past, present, and future pass all of our exams – and even those that don’t do quite as well as they hope usually go on to get their degrees.

“How can I write this paper when I don’t know what you (the professor) expect?” Professors do sometimes have specific expectations for their assignments, and it can be good to clarify what to include. But all professors I know mostly want to see that students have engaged with course material and concepts, and have learned something through the process. When students focus on learning rather than the imagined expectations, they tend to do just fine.

“I have too much work to do; I’ll never make it through finals.” Students, and faculty, may indeed have lots to do before the end of finals. But sometimes it can be helpful this time of year to offer a simple reminder based on consistent experience: every year to date finals do, eventually, end.

Featured Image: Photo by Zachary Spears on Unsplash

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How Our Students Compare: Some Data on Mental Health

the quad at UP, students walking across campusFor over fifty years the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA and their Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) have been administering surveys to incoming first-year college students at U.S. institutions of higher education. The questions they ask have evolved over time, but contain lots of interesting tidbits — ranging from the percentage of students who think it is important to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life” (down from 86% in 1967 to 46% in 2015) to the percentage who think “colleges should have the right to ban extreme speakers from campus” (up from 20% in 1974 to  43% in 2015). UP has been a regular participant in these surveys, which in recent years have started to add questions related to student mental health and psychological well-being — some of which may be interesting for faculty and academic staff to consider when noticing trends for our students.

According to our Office of Institutional Research, about 85% of UP’s incoming first year students in 2016 filled out the HERI survey — which is a remarkably high response rate. UP is then provided with data on its own students and pre-established comparison groups. One of these comparison groups is “Catholic 4-Year Colleges (High Selectivity)”*, and data is also available up to 2015 on national trends in a 50th anniversary report. So how do our students compare?

In general, it looks as though entering UP students seem to report slightly higher rates of mental health concerns. The percent who “frequently felt depressed” is 16.7%, compared with 9.9% at the comparison group of Catholic colleges and 9.5% of all incoming first year students nationally. Likewise, the percent who “frequently felt anxious” entering UP is 48.4%, compared with 34% at the comparison group of Catholic colleges (no national data is available for that question).

Here are some visuals of other relevant questions:

percent of incoming first-year students who frequently felt "overwhelmed by all I had to do" total: UP 54.3% 11 other catholic 4-year colleges 41.7% 2015 national average 34.1% Men: UP 37.1 % 11 other catholic 4-year colleges 26.2% 2015 national average 20.5% Women: UP 63.7% 11 other catholic 4-year colleges 52.7% 2015 national average 45.3%

percent of incoming first-year students who rater their emotional health in the highest 10% or above average: total: UP 40.3% 11 other catholic 4-year colleges 51.3% 2015 national average 50.6% Men: UP 53.6% 11 other catholic 4-year colleges 60.3% 2015 national average 59% Women: UP 31.8% 11 other catholic 4-year colleges 45.1% 2015 national average 43.7%

percent of incoming first-year students who thought there was a "very good chance of seeking personal counseling": total: UP 17.6% 11 other catholic 4-year colleges 12.7% 2015 national average 13.9% Men: UP 14.3% 11 other catholic 4-year colleges 10.5% 2015 national average 10.8% Women: UP 19.8% 11 other catholic 4-year colleges 14.2% 2015 national average 16.4%

So, what are the take-aways for those of us who work with students on the academic side of the University? Like all data, there are multiple ways to interpret but here are a few thoughts that strike me:

  1. I’m surprised that incoming UP students seem to have slightly more psychological concerns than students at comparison schools. It’s possible that is a sampling issue — our response rate to the surveys is very high, so it is possible we are actually getting a more representative sample than other schools. But it is also possible that students are attracted to UP because it promotes a caring community, and thus may feel safer for students willing to acknowledge their mental health needs. But for faculty and academic staff who feel like more UP students are feeling stressed and stretched compared with other places we’ve been, it’s possible that is more than just a feeling.
  2. It’s probably a good thing that we have slightly more incoming students willing to consider counseling — though stigmas against psychological counseling continue to decline, they still exist and can be a barrier to getting help. Some of this data suggest our students might be open to the suggestion if faculty and academic staff suggest a visit to the Health and Counseling Center might be worthwhile.
  3. In all the different bits of data, women are more willing to report psychological concerns than men. This is a very common issue in mental health data, which raises important questions about whether women actually experience more mental health concerns, or are just more likely to express those concerns in ways that fit with self-report surveys. I tend to think the latter, which suggests that our male students with mental health concerns may be less open to easy conversations — though equally important to reach.
  4. The majority of our students, and all students nationally, do not report major psychological concerns. There is a fine line between wanting to make sure we help students who need help, and pathologizing a whole generation — contemporary college students, and contemporary UP students, have ups and downs like college students of any generation. More students these days are willing to attend college with psychological concerns in tow, and with a willingness to discuss those concerns. That can create valuable opportunities for faculty and academic staff to truly consider the whole person when we work with students.

 

*The Catholic 4-Year Colleges (High Selectivity) group includes Benedictine College (Kansas), Christian Brothers University (Tennessee), Creighton University (Nebraska), Fairfield University (Connecticut), Providence College (Rhode Island), Sacred Heart University (Connecticut), Saint Mary’s College (Indiana), Saint Norbert College (Wisconsin), Seattle University (Washington), University of Detroit Mercy (Michigan), and us.

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What students want you to know about mental health

a woman wearing a backpack seen from behind - with rose blossoms in the backgroundThis post is an entry for Part III of the Mentally Healthy resource guide for UP faculty and academic staff working with students who might have mental health concerns.

If your students had a chance to tell you what they think about how faculty and academic staff matter to student mental health, what might they say? During a 2018 TLC brownbag many of us had a chance to find out. Karen Eifler and the Teaching and Learning Collaborative hosted a brownbag presentation by Molly Thomas and Rachel Mehlman in their roles as student leaders from the UP chapter of Active Minds – along with our colleague Sarina Saturn in her role as Active Minds faculty advisor. The discussion was robust, with student derived ideas leading to a productive back-and-forth with faculty, academic staff, and administrators.

First, what is Active Minds? It is a national organization that has chapters for students at a wide variety of educational institutions, including the one UP students started about three years ago. As the national organization describes itself: “Active Minds is the leading nonprofit organization that empowers students to speak openly about mental health in order to educate others and encourage help-seeking.  We are changing the culture on campuses and in the community by providing information, leadership opportunities and advocacy training to the next generation.”

The UP chapter has been busy in recent years doing student campaigns to improve mental health awareness through chalking messages, symbol campaigns with paper flowers on the quad, contributing to events addressing coping with loss and stress, and more. The chapter also gets together students who are particularly interested in and concerned about supporting campus mental health – meaning that they think a lot about what is being done well at UP, what could use improvement, and what best practices we could borrow from other places. They think about, in other words, how what we do in the classroom matters beyond their grades.

One relatively simple suggestion for teaching faculty during the brownbag was to make sure that on the first day of class we include some discussion of the mental health syllabus statement. Students know that much of the stuff on the syllabus is perfunctory, but they noted that it matters if professors take the time to emphasize the available supports and the reality that at least some students will experience mental health concerns each semester.

Students also suggested trying to use the first week of class to humanize ourselves – to share some information about our own (sometimes messy) lives, to emphasize that we care about students as people, and to emphasize that we’re happy to talk with students during office hours. In the room we discussed how many new college students think of office hours as something like a high school teacher’s ‘planning period’ – meaning that many are reluctant to interrupt. Having some “meet and greet” office hours, even with ‘canned’ questions, can help students feel integrated.

The Active Minds group also noted that attendance policies can be complicated for students with mental health concerns. As they framed it:

  • “Some professors will drop your grade 10% after two absences unless I have a doctor’s note”
  • “The health center doesn’t give out sick notes” [which is true, in case anyone doesn’t already know – the Health and Counseling Center at UP has a general policy of not giving ‘sick notes’ to not confuse matters]
  • “Just adds to my depression to feel so horrible about missing class to take care of my mental health when I can’t even get out of bed”

They asked whether in our classes we might “consider allowing a personal day, like in the workforce” and suggested we avoid “calling out students sarcastically if they have been MIA (maybe they are not slackers, but in the throes of deep depression)”

When students do start having attendance problems that may be mental health related, the discussion centered around first reaching out to students before making any assumptions. The group also discussed Early Alert as an important option, though students noted some concerns that submitting an Early Alert can quickly escalate. Some students have had experiences where an Early Alert submission led to dramatic intervention by Public Safety and contact with parents – which are often necessary to ensure students are safe, but which in some cases may be perceived by students as excessive and discouraging. It is important to err on the side of caution, but it is also important to be sensitive to student perceptions and some need for confidentiality.

Another best practice mentioned in the discussion is to make sure we as faculty and academic staff know the available resources for students: remind students that appointments at the counseling center are free (or, more accurately, already paid for by virtue of regular tuition and fees) and confidential. Know that the Health and Counseling Center phone number now includes access to after hours phone counseling through ProtoCall. Know about the presence of diverse clubs that can help students with evolving identities feel at home: the Gay-Straight Partnership; Students Against Sexual Assault; other diversity and multicultural clubs; the International Club; etc.. Students also see diversity as closely related to mental health, and emphasized the importance of respecting different beliefs and backgrounds – whether that be in relation to religious strictures, cultural stigmas related to mental health, or the implications of racial, gender, and socio-economic inequality.

Our hour-long discussion was too short – Active Minds had other slides and suggestions that we didn’t get to given the robustness of the discussion. Dr. Saturn, in her role as faculty advisor for Active Minds also encouraged anyone interested in more information to contact her via email (saturns@up.edu). But a good general take-away would be the reality that we can all benefit from more discussions and dialogue around mental health needs and concerns. Faculty and academic staff may be the experts in our subject areas, but students are the experts at perceiving how what happens in and around our classes impacts their well-being.

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Mentally Healthy: Failure (Deprivation) and Resilience?

the shadow of a walking figure on a wall

This post is an entry for Part II of the Mentally Healthy resource guide for UP faculty and academic staff working with students who might have mental health concerns.

Many of us know the feeling: seeing that first-year student “fail” (sometimes meaning a C, but still…) their first exam, and having to suddenly confront their first academic struggle. Or the senior getting rejected by their first choice graduate program, and having to suddenly reconcile what they thought they could do academically with what others think they can do.  We recognize the feeling of inadequacy students feel. And the question about whether they belong. And the sudden uncertainty about their future plans. And the loneliness.

We often know the feeling because we still have it too: the scholarly paper rejected by the ideal journal after years of hard work; the student evaluations that sting with personal criticisms of a newly designed course; the memories or our own failures as students or our own graduate school rejections.

These things are hard to take at any stage of life, but there is some sense in higher education that the impact of failure may be particularly acute for contemporary students. The argument, as described in a 2017 New York Times article that was the featured piece for a recent Faith and Intellectual Life Discussion Group, is that “even as they were ever more outstanding on paper, students seemed unable to cope with simple struggles.” According to the article, administrators at Stanford and Harvard started calling it being “failure deprived.”

I am generally wary of claims that the current generation of students is particularly vulnerable to mental health concerns – college students have always had mental health concerns, and if anything we have likely gotten slightly better at destigmatizing that reality. We need to do better at supporting students, not pathologizing them. But I am also intrigued by the idea that there is value in faculty and academic staff helping students learn to cope with failure, at least partially by acknowledging their own.

The Times article cites a number of thought-provoking examples:

  • Smith College uses a “Narratives Project” to have students and staff tell stories about failure – ideally helping others realize they are not alone.
  • Stanford offers a “Resilience Project” that includes a “Stanford, I Screwed Up!” event described as “commemorating and celebrating the ‘epic failures’ in our lives. Students from across campus come together and share experiences through storytelling, comedy, poetry, song, video, spoken word, and other creative means.”
  • Harvard has a “Success-Failure Project” where they offer “Reflections on Rejections” –  “a collection of video and text reflections about rejection from Harvard University deans, faculty, students, and alums, as well as several of their actual rejection letters that some of them received. The letters are kind, cruel, or just form letters, but all Reflections on Rejections contributors were courageous enough to share their letters and their insights.”
  • Princeton has a “Perspective Project” where they suggest: “Everyone faces struggles, setbacks, and failures at some point in their Princeton career, yet we so rarely talk about these experiences. Members of the Princeton Perspective Project believe that sharing these stories will reveal a new perspective on campus life, while helping all of us to be more resilient by understanding that failure is a natural part of the path to success — however you define it.”
  • Penn uses a “PennFaces” component of their own “Resilience Project” to feature “stories of successes and failures, ups and downs, hardships and self-discoveries, in order to foster resilience and create more honest and open dialogue on Penn’s campus. It celebrates the diversity of members of the Penn community – students, faculty, staff, and alumni – by sharing stories that can connect all of us. In sharing these stories and perspectives, we hope to deconstruct the Penn Face – the idea that one must always appear busy, happy, and successful at everything all the time. Let’s challenge the single notion of success.”

Are UP students as “failure deprived” as students at Stanford or Princeton? For better or worse, they are probably not. (Though Portland did kind-of make an appearance in the Times article, when it discussed the broader issue in higher education by noting “If it all feels a bit like a “Portlandia” sketch, that’s because it actually was one: in which Fred and Carrie decide to hire a bully to teach grit to students, one who uses padded gym mats to make sure the children don’t actually get hurt.”) It’s also important to not fetishize failure as part of a cultural self-help narrative.

But these examples may offer a helpful reminder that our best students, like all our students, are not immune from mental health challenges. And sometimes hearing faculty and academic staff in the context of our classes or our advising talk about our own failures might help students keep things in perspective. Maybe, in other words, our own lack of failure deprivation could be put to good use.

Featured Image: Photo by David Werbrouck on Unsplash

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Intersections? How diversity, mental health, and teaching might mix

an aerial view of 2 intersecting footpathsThis post is an entry for Part III of the Mentally Healthy resource guide for UP faculty and academic staff working with students who might have mental health concerns.

Anyone paying attention to higher education in recent years is well aware of two pressing issues on regular repeat: changing perceptions of student mental health needs, and the need to better attend to diversity and inclusion. But how might those two issues intersect? How might an equity lens inform the way academics, and academic institutions, think about student mental health?

Several organizations working collaboratively on those issues (including the JED Foundation and the Steve Fund) recently produced an “Equity in Mental Health Framework” that highlights needs and offers ten specific “recommendations for colleges and universities to support the emotional well-being and mental health of students of color.” The full report is available on-line, and while it is a bit more oriented towards administrative policy than classroom practice it is worth a browse for the curious. For this teaching and learning blog, however, here are a few quick takeaways that might inform faculty and academic staff at UP.

First, the report notes that there are good empirical reasons (beyond the obvious ethical reasons) to pay attention to equity in mental health. In two national studies involving thousands of racially diverse college students Harris Poll research found, among other things, that:

  • “First-year college students of color are significantly less likely than white students to rate their overall college experience as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ (69% to 80%)”
  • “Students of color are significantly less likely than white students to rate their campus climate as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ (61% to 79%)”
  • “Students of color are significantly less likely to describe their campus as inclusive (28% to 45%)”

These types of statistics do not by themselves suggest that students of color are necessarily more or less likely to confront mental health issues – in fact, mental health concerns are a relatively equal opportunity reality (with some interesting and important demographic differences). But they do suggest that college and university environments may have a different social and emotional climate for students from diverse backgrounds.

So what can be done to promote a social and emotional climate that is supportive and inclusive for all students? Many of the recommendations in the ‘Equity in Mental Health Framework’ are structural (including, for example, promoting “the mental health and well-being of students of color as a campus-wide priority” and to “actively recruit, train and retain a diverse and culturally competent faculty and professional staff”). There are also several that might be worth thinking about for our work with students in and around the classroom.

Recommendation #4, for example, involves creating “opportunities to engage around national and international issues/events” including cultural movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. This seems like a natural fit for many educational contexts – both in and out of classrooms. It is not always easy to create constructive spaces that are genuinely educational to discuss current events that are complex and evolving, but it is worth remembering that doing so thoughtfully can matter to students who otherwise feel disconnected and marginalized.

Recommendation #7, as a second example, involves offering “a range of supportive programs and services in varied formats” that might include discussion groups and workshops allowing students from diverse backgrounds to connect and engage with developing identity issues. This recommendation makes me think of the many positive experiences I know UP students have had with groups such as the Hawai’i Club, the Black Student Union, the Feminist Discussion Group, Active Minds, and many others that are student-driven but thrive with faculty and staff support.

Working toward “equity in mental health” at colleges and universities is a big project that goes well beyond just what academics do with teaching and learning. But we faculty and academic staff can do our part by recognizing the ways teaching and learning can create further intersections for both equity and mental health.

 

Featured Image: Photo by Mike Enerio on Unsplash