Introduction

So, I’ve split my time in higher education between the classroom and administration, and one benefit, one of the only benefits of being in the administration is that it is given me a more global perspective. When I got back into the classroom a few years ago, on a full-time basis, I noticed just how many more of my students were failing my classes, and that a disproportionate number of those students were grappling with mental health challenges.

Now, I knew it wasn’t helpful that they weren’t passing my class, but what I learned from being in the administration was not only were they not passing my class, but that many of them weren’t earning their degrees. COVID made all of this worse, to be sure, but this is not just a COVID flash-in-the-pan problem. This has been an escalating problem over the last decade, and the data that we’ve got from the wonderful Healthy Mind study is really troubling. In the latest year for which we have data, we’ve got 44% of our students experiencing depressive symptoms, 37% experiencing anxiety disorder, and 15% experiencing suicidal ideations.

This course is about how we can help address some of those things, even for students who aren’t experiencing depression or anxiety, how we can promote their wellness by becoming what some scholars have called natural mentors, that as we do that, we can make it more possible for them to learn more and complete their degrees. And when you think about the lifelong impact that can have, the difference between going to college for a semester or two and burning out, and maybe even feeling like you are just not cut out for that kind of thing, or persevering, finishing a degree and getting all the benefits for the rest of your life that come from that, what we do as faculty can have lifelong impacts for our students in this regard.

There’s an old Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson, that’s dark humor, I’ll forewarn you, but I love it. He’s got a veterinary student looking at a textbook with a table entitled, “Equestrian Medicine,” and on the left side, they’ve got a bunch of ailments, and on the right side, the remedies. No matter what the ailment was, on the right side, the remedy was, “Shoot the horse.” Well, it turns out the research shows in higher education, whether you want to improve student learning, increase graduation rates, improve student satisfaction, help more students thrive after they graduate, or decrease suicidal ideations, the best intervention is the same, and it is to improve the connection between students and their teachers.

And one bit of research from the folks at Gallup Research in Purdue University, they found that students who had professors who cared about them, or at least the students felt that way, were 1.7 times more likely to thrive in life. That got me wondering, do my students feel like I care about them, and what more can I do to make it clear that I care about them? The bottom line is that by investing just a little bit of time in intentional ways and helping our students know that we care about them, becoming what some scholars have called natural mentors, we can make life better in all sorts of ways for our students, but particularly from a mental health standpoint, and we’ll talk about that more in the next segment.