Issues Facing Faculty With Mental Health Concerns
Jay Gabbard, Western Kentucky University
Keywords:
Faculty, Mental Health, Academia
Key Statement:
Faculty with mental health issues often face distinct challenges in academia. This poster reports the results of a national study on this important issue.
Abstract:
Faculty members with psychiatric concerns often face significant challenges in academia. These can include challenges in obtaining tenure and promotion, stigma from colleagues, difficulty in disclosing conditions, and a lack of adequate mental health services to assist them. An exploratory mixed-methods cross-sectional study gathered data (n = 503) from an online survey of faculty members working at colleges and universities in the United States. The electronic posted presentation will examine the presence and contribution of prevailing workplace stressors that influence faculty mental health and emotional stability-as well as ascertain their level of psychiatric concerns and explore potential solutions to them.
Hear it from the author:
Transcript:
Hi colleagues, my name is Dr. Jay Gabbard and this poster reports the results of a national study of faculty mental health one of the first of its kind ever done, that's data-driven .
Basically, we wanted to ascertain what are the unique struggles of faculty members in the academy who have mental health issues?
And what is it about the unique milieu of academia that can sometimes exacerbate psychiatric conditions that faculty members have.
We did a national study of over 3,000 faculty members in our own field and received an initial response rate of over 600, which was cut down to 500 after data cleaning.
There were some interesting findings-Some of them being that approximately one third of our faculty reported formal mental health diagnoses, which is much higher than we expected, even in a profession of wounded healers .
A number of faculty reported discrimination and stigma as a result of their mental health conditions.
We found that many administrators were not prepared to discuss these issues with faculty, with psychiatric conditions .
And some of these issues were even more exacerbated by our colleagues who were non- heterosexual.
So that's the purpose of this poster presentation.
And I look forward to sharing it with you.
References:
Liang, X., & Bautista, O. O. (2021). Analysis on the difference of college teachers’ professional pressure and strategies to improve teachers’ mental health under the expectancy theory. Work, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.3233/wor-213498
Quijada, M. A. (2020). My mental health struggle in academia: What I wish all business school faculty, students, and administration knew. Journal of Management Education, 45(1), 19–42.
Tucker, S., Melnyk, B., Corona, L., Corona, C., & Roberts, H. (2022). A model of depression in university faculty, staff, and health care workers using an automated mental health screening tool. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 64(7), 607–613.
Whitten, L. (2022). Stigma matters: An African American psychology professor comes out of the mental illness closet. Psychological Services, 19(1), 35–37.