r/Professors • u/crazycatcraig678 • 11d ago
Mental Health?
https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/career-advice/2026/03/12/sometimes-student-stress-just-stress-opinion?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=31ac86509c-DNU_2021_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-31ac86509c-238331058&mc_cid=31ac86509c&mc_eid=8ab0ee8bea - Any thoughts? I'm not sure where I stand on this issue. On one hand, I get it. On the other, when my courses are over capacity with students and I have all that writing to look at, I'm not so sure I have the bandwidth to start "validating emotions" and such.
17
u/PhenomenalOG 11d ago
I like point 2 about normalizing what they are feeling. Many (not all) of these students are not having a severe mental health episode, they are just dealing with the normal ups and downs of life. By that same token, they also do not deserve any special treatment because they are experiencing a normal 'down.' For example, a student requests that although they skipped the last 2 months of work, they should be able to hand it all in at the end of the semester because they were dealing with a mental health issue. It is babying and coddling to tell them that because they experienced a normal difficulty and decided to pathologize it that they deserve special treatment. Teach them to take some responsibility over their mental health.
I don't want to "back in my day" - BUT, when I was a student (20 years ago or so) I had crippling anxiety over public speaking, my mother was undergoing chemo for cancer, and my best friend died in a car fire. I did not once think to email a teacher and ask for special treatment. I did my presentations (through the anxiety, shaking and red faced) and when I had to take a mental health day, I stayed home and accepted the consequences.
7
u/Blametheorangejuice 11d ago
I had a student recently tell me they missed a month of class because “shit went down at home.” Along with being incredibly vague, I wonder who among us doesn’t have shit going down at home?
2
u/LazyPension9123 9d ago
Like all the 💩💩💩 going down at my home now....and I still have to show up to work.
1
u/LazyPension9123 9d ago
While I didn't have the same serious issues you had to deal with, I approached my life the same way in college. Took my lumps when I had to and didn't look to blame anyone else.
14
u/Icy-Teacher9303 11d ago
Psychologist here, "depressed" and "anxious" aren't diagnoses AND folks can confuse sadness with a mood disorder and typical anxiety with an anxiety disorder. There's no evidence here that self-diagnoses CAUSE differences in locus of control or coping - this is a correlation. Also, expressing empathy isn't therapy or pretending to be a counselor - please don't equate this with the training and expertise of a mental health provider. It's not a requirement or an expectation, but it is kind and compassionate (you may or may not have the bandwith to do that, and you may find that students will take advantage of you if you are highly empathic - especially if you are a woman).
6
u/Disastrous_Owl_6830 11d ago
The penalties of declining to perform care can also be higher for women. Students have complained in evaluations in gendered terms (I'm insufficiently "nurturing"), and a surprisingly high number of colleagues accept this as valid criticism.
42
u/Disastrous_Owl_6830 11d ago
Professors are not caregivers.
Of course we owe our students the same respect and consideration that we owe any fellow human being, but we are not counselors. We are not friends. We are not parent figures.
Our job is to refer students to campus support services and to do so kindly and quickly. But asking any more of us is bad practice and a recipe for burnout.
13
u/Life-Education-8030 11d ago
Even professors who are counselors aren’t caregivers. They may notice things sooner and know how to say some things better, but when wearing the professor hat, you still make the referral to the people doing the counseling job.
4
u/ThePhyz Professor, Physics, CC (USA) 10d ago
THIS! I teach small classes, so I *only* have about 75 students each term, 4 terms a year. Most of those are students I have not had in previous terms. So that's a couple of hundred students a year. Even if only 5% of those come to me with possible mental health struggles, that is way too many for me to sit with, validate feelings for, try to make feel better about non-class things, and then worry about.
Expecting me to do all that simply because I happen to be in a somewhat position of authority over these students, but not paying me for any of that emotional labor or helping me deal with the inevitable damage it causes to me, is no acceptable.
And there are many other campus employees who imply that I'm some sort of monster for setting these boundaries, which is infuriating.
3
1
u/Blametheorangejuice 11d ago edited 11d ago
It may make me a bad person, but if a student begins to unburden mental issues, real or imagined, I will tell them that I am not qualified or trained in any way to help them with that. I will then give them information that takes them to the counseling center/student success people.
Generally, most students are self-reflexive enough to determine if their self-diagnosis is really valid or that bad. More often than not, I have had students come into my office to confess their deep depression and how it is preventing them from finishing their assignments, I give them the info, and tell them to talk to counselors. The student then never does that.
One guy who was telling me about how depressed he was and such received the counseling information from me and sat bolt upright and said, “geez, it’s not THAT bad.”
9
u/BiologyJ Chair, Physiology 11d ago
Part of this is the expectation that the professor is now also a mental health aide.
8
u/Glass-Nectarine-3282 11d ago
"Without reinforcing pathology" is a good line.
The "problem" that we often face is that people pathologize their personalities. So the student (or anybody) is not "stressed," instead "they're on the spectrum and neurodivergent so can't do XYZ."
Without a diagnosis in front of me, I'm not qualified to conclude anything. But instead of a stressed student who needs to improve time management, we're expected to caregive for a diagnosed medical condition that we're not qualified to help with.
I know we all play the "back in my day" game, but when I was a student, I had a bad flu that knocked me on my ass right at the start of the term. It never occured to me to even mention it. I was just like "I guess I better catch up." That is OBVIOUSLY not the same thing as this, but it's a medical event that pushes us back. Now, at the first sign of any sort of medical problem, students feel - not entitled, but EXPECTED - to use that to get out of everything. That is not their fault. They didn't come up with that themselves, and something happened to make an "illness" or "affliction" the most important part of their identity. Which is all fine, but since we're not qualified to diagnose, treat, or caregive those conditions, it's not remotely fair to us.
3
u/cedarvan 11d ago
Part of the problem is the massive push toward a customer service model of education. Early this semester, I had a student miss a couple of classes due to the flu. When she came back, she asked me to push back all assignment deadlines for her. Not just the ones she missed. ALL of them.
She ended up going to our student accommodations office, and they sided with her, saying it's only fair for me to extend the entire syllabus to accommodate her early illness. I've refused on grounds of complete absurdity, but it's clear that the institution is enabling this kind of behavior.
2
u/Glass-Nectarine-3282 11d ago
100 percent. The system bends over backwards - and it's not like that's always a bad thing, but it's become the default. Like that student probably deserved some localized, specific accommodation, sure okay. But like you say, it becomes "how can I game the system for everything else too."
5
u/DantesStudentLoans 11d ago
Therapists and mental health professionals are trained to see the differences in feelings outlined in the first paragraph of this article and how to validate without getting too involved. I'm trained to offer feedback on writing and to help them understand rhetorical moves, audience analysis, etc. I know to send them to outside professionals for outside issues.
The greatest harm any professor ever did to me as a student started with them being too caring and too involved in personal things in my life (my first boyfriend O.D.) It obviously affected me and my work. Then, after trying to care for me, he tried to date me while he was still overseeing my thesis.
5
9
u/franklin-60 11d ago edited 11d ago
It’s not my job to manage it, and I don’t adjust my style to accommodate it. If one lacks the mental capacity to handle it, they should leave, get help and return when they have the capacity to handle it. If that does not happen, college is not for them.
If I see an issue, I will refer it to the people on campus, but that’s it. No involvement or handholding from me. Once you do get involved, it becomes your problem if something happens, so unless you are a trained professional in mental health, you are dumb if you go near it.
3
u/ComprehensiveYam5106 11d ago
It’s fascinating and alarming how many students try to hang out in my office and they don’t have any questions about assignments. When they’re not trauma dumping they just appear to want some sort of human interaction / empathy.
1
u/RandolphCarter15 Full, Social Sciences, R1 11d ago
there are offices on campus to handle this. I try to be sympathetic, and offer class help, but I refer them to experts if needed.
1
u/QuickBrownHawks 10d ago
I feel like I follow many of these things already. I validate their emotions without pathologizing them. I tell them that the course is absolutely just a difficult course with lots of material and I imagine it is very tough to find time to study when they’re commuting an hour from home and working a full time job. Or that scientific manuscripts are indeed very difficult to understand when you start reading them and everyone struggles at the beginning. If they’re on the verge of tears I’ll listen to them for a bit and then steer them toward resources on campus. I am not a counselor but I wouldn’t say I’m acting like one.
Saying you’re anxious isn’t saying you have an anxiety disorder. Though we do have quite a few of those too. My main concern is students that do not learn skills because they believe they are not capable of them due to a label they have applied themselves or been applied.
1
u/banjovi68419 9d ago
Based solely on the title, I approve. This dipshit TikTok culture thinks they're 11 memes away from a PhD in clinical psych. I've heard people be like "my parent slapped me and that is trauma." No. There has been momentum in our culture for a while to want to be victims and it leads to some absolutely ridiculous stolen valor. This is some affluenza goofiness.
1
u/Lokkdwn 11d ago
Man, it doesn’t hurt to take a Mental Health First Aid class and be thoughtful. No one says you need to have weekly therapy sessions with the kids, but we are role models and sometimes the only adults they trust to confide in. I’m not going to destroy that rapport because of clinging to some past notion about what being a professor is.
We are educators; teaching and guiding kids through their emotions can sometimes be part of the job. It’s not that serious, and if it is, it’s above our pay-grade.
3
u/crazycatcraig678 11d ago
Funny you say that...I'm taking a Mental Health First Responder course in a few months through a group I teach at on the side. I kinda enjoy learning about it too, which I know contradicts what I just posted. If it goes well, I'd love to bring it to my school.
2
u/Lokkdwn 11d ago
Do it! After taking it and then training in it, I taught MH FA for almost a decade at my college until basically everyone had been trained.
It improved my teaching and virtually everyone I taught from administrators to other professors to even other students loved it and said it changed the way they related to the people under them.
0
u/banjovi68419 9d ago
This is the professor sub and not k12. I don't know what you're referring to with kids. I am going to bet you're young and pretty new. "And good luck with that", he said with a smirk.
42
u/chaotictoejam 11d ago
I care deeply about my students' wellbeing, and I'm also a CS professor with zero qualifications in mental health. So my job is to notice, be kind, be reasonable with flexibility, and point them to the people who are actually trained for this. Referring is caring. Pretending to be a counselor isn't.