A Culture of Caring for Faculty and Staff

Source: mohamed hassan/pxhere

I recently had the privilege to attend conferences at both the University of Michigan and Georgetown University focused on improving the mental health of college students of color. These events were organized by The Steve Fund, a non-profit whom we at Persistence Plus have collaborated with to increase students’ awareness of campus mental health resources and destigmatize seeking help from those services.

With student reports of depression and anxiety on the rise, and an increasing need for colleges to provide mental health resources to ensure their students’ success, there couldn’t be a more immediate need for the wisdom and strategies shared during these conferences.

But even as I moderated a panel on how community colleges can build a Culture of Caring for their students, I must admit that I was distracted. Faculty and staff at colleges nationwide do extraordinary (and typically undervalued) work to support students with mental health challenges—often to the neglect of their own mental health needs. Despite our absolutely critical discussions on how we better support students’ mental health, I couldn’t help but to scan the faces in the audience and wonder how each and every one of them was doing.

You see, Dr. David Bucci, a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College, committed suicide on October 15. Dave left behind a wife, three children, and 15 years' worth of grateful graduate and undergraduate students, myself included. When I was earning my Ph.D. at Dartmouth (2008-2011), Dave served as a kind of graduate student ombudsman, an advocate for us when we had issues with other faculty members. I didn’t know Dave well, but I admired him as a professor who seemed to have students’ best interests at heart in an environment where that sentiment often didn’t feel universal.

Unfortunately, Dave’s story is becoming all too familiar on college campuses:

• Dr. Alan Krueger, professor of political economy at Princeton, March 2019
• Dr. Gregory Eells, Director of Counseling and Psychological Services at Penn, September 2019
• Dr. Katherine McWain, professor of English at Texas Women’s University, September 2019
• Nathan Westbrook, lecturer in psychology at Cal State Fullerton, October 2019

When I started writing this piece, my intention was to only write about Dave. I had no idea I would find so many other faculty and staff suicides that occurred this semester alone (and this may not be a complete list). In all of these cases, I have no idea what pain they faced nor what they had done to address it. I have no story to tell about battling stigma or inadequate mental health resources. But each story reaffirms my conviction that a Culture of Caring that supports the mental health of our students needs to not just be built by our faculty and staff, but to include them, as well.

So what can we do? The first step is to have honest conversations about the mental health of faculty and staff. We work so hard to create a supportive environment for our students, meanwhile ignoring the fact that some of those same students with mental health challenges will one day be faculty and staff with mental health challenges. Indeed, a recent report in Nature revealed that over a third of Ph.D. students had sought help for anxiety or depression. And their challenges will surely persist: academics face higher mental health risks than other professions, due to factors such as job insecurity, inadequate work-life balance, and high-pressure environments—a grim reminder that nobody should ever be asked to ‘publish or perish.’

Luckily, we’re not at square one. A team of researchers led by Dr. Margaret Price, Associate Professor of English and Director of Disability Studies at the Ohio State University, has been studying faculty mental health. Their first-of-its-kind survey, published in 2017, revealed that among 267 faculty who self-identified as having a mental disability, nearly 70% didn’t know about available accommodations, and only 13% actually took advantage of those supports. Dr. Price and her colleague, Dr. Stephanie Kerschbaum of the University of Delaware, have since released a free resource guide in which they provide strategies for creating a “culture of access…that considers disability a source of knowledge and diversity, and that encourages collective accountability and cooperative action.”

Several colleges are now forming partnerships to educate faculty and staff about mental illness and train them to look for the warning signs of someone in crisis. Programs like Mental Health First Aid teach individuals how to respond to mental health and addiction challenges, lessons that can be applied to students and colleagues alike (many thanks to Christine Mangino and Cara Crowley for informing me about these programs). Services like Crisis Text Line, a free way to connect with a crisis counselor via text message, is often marketed to students but could just as easily be promoted to faculty and staff. But as I discovered while doing research for this piece, it’s far too challenging to locate mental health resources for faculty and staff themselves that are not solely focused on how they can help their students.

Going forward, a Culture of Caring should not be a top-down, unidirectional effort meant only to support students, but a holistic approach that supports every single person within that community. Furthermore, we need additional research to better understand faculty and staff mental health. Currently, we don’t have a good sense of how large or serious the problem might be, nor what barriers to support might be uniquely experienced by faculty and staff. Moreover, and in line with how the Steve Fund has sought to understand student mental health through an equity lens, this research should distinguish mental health challenges faced uniquely by both men and women, people of color, LGBTQ individuals, individuals living with disabilities, and more. Such knowledge would help us make great strides toward losing no more of our colleagues to suicide.

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If you’re having suicidal thoughts or ideations, please reach out to someone you know or text HOME to 741741. If you would like to make a donation to support mental health research in honor of Dave or anyone you’ve lost to suicide, please visit The National Institute of Mental Health.