Well-Being for Life and Learning Training Program

In 2021 and 2022, Health Promotion offered the Supporting Students Mental Health workshop series, reaching more than 300 faculty and staff. Participants shared that students frequently disclosed concerns beyond academics, including anxiety, depression, and trauma, but many felt underprepared to respond confidently. Based on this feedback, we began work to further evolve the original workshop series. Throughout the 2022-2023 academic year, we conducted surveys with faculty, instructors and student support staff, held focus groups with students, and gathered a cohort of campus experts to help contribute to this initiative, which launched in September 2023.

Over the past decade, there has been a gradual decline in the mental health and well-being of college students, with a notable increasing following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (Lee, Solomon, Stead, Kwon, and Ganti, 2021). At many institutions nationally, student well-being programming, services, and policy have been one of the largest priorities since 2020 however yet, students continue to face even higher levels of anxiety, stress, and depression as a result of the fallout of the pandemic.

Given the increased demand for student mental health support at higher education institutions, faculty and student support staff have been deemed as the “gatekeepers” of student mental health as they are often the first person that students go to when they are in distress. In fact, a 2020 study conducted by the Boston University School of Public Health, the Mary Christie Foundation, and the Healthy Minds Network found that almost 80 percent of faculty stated that they spoke with students regarding their students’ mental health and wellness in the past 12 months (Boston University School of Public Health, Mary Christie Foundation, the Healthy Minds Network, and Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation, 2021). Of those faculty, 51% reported that they felt equipped to recognize a student in distress and yet 73% wanted to have more knowledge on how to best support the mental health of students (Boston University School of Public Health et al., 2021).

To gain more insight into our own U of R faculty and staff, we launched a needs assessment in Spring of 2023. Comparably, our findings showed that 85% of faculty and staff have spoken one-on-one with a student about their mental health and/or well-being in the last 12 months and over half of staff (59%) and faculty (74%) stated that they had never received specialized training to navigate discussions with students in distress. However, akin to the national average, 70% of them stated that they are motivated to learn.

Probably our most notable findings have come from students. According to the 2023 Student Voice survey on health and wellness, students rated professors as the number 1 group on campus that have a responsibility to help them ease their stress and 45% of professors say that faculty have a responsibility to help students struggling with their mental health, which goes beyond just dealing with stress (Flaherty, 2023).

With the large percentage of faculty and staff poised with this role on supporting students included in or on top of their job responsibilities, these data demonstrate the need to equip them with tools to recognize students in distress and support the well-being of the students that they engage with on a regular basis in quick, effective, and compassionate ways.

The learning environment is the most influential factor in a student’s overall college experience and is deeply connected to academic success and personal wellness, putting faculty in unique and critical positions for supporting student well-being (Okanagan Charter, 2015). Extensive research has shown that student well-being is impacted through various aspects of learning environments, from the course curriculum, course design, assignments and testing, grading, classroom culture, the classroom space, as well as the teachers (Di Placito-De Rango, 2019; Stanton, Zandvliet, Black & Dhaliwal, 2016).

At academic research institutions, learning does not stop as one leaves the classroom; Students are often highly involved in a variety of offices and departments on campus through work positions, student groups, volunteering, and tapping into student support services. To enable and empower students to thrive, engaging with student support staff is thus critical to establish a shared understanding of student well-being as well as education on tools to compassionately support students in all places students are engaged with on campus.