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Abstract

Although there is a high prevalence of mental ill-health among university faculty, we know little about how universities have responded to growing concerns about faculty mental health. In this paper, we examine typical mental health interventions implemented in universities. We conducted semistructured, qualitative interviews with 34 academic workers and 20 nonacademic workers and administrators employed at Canadian universities. We identify three main features of university interventions and document their impact on the work and health of academic workers. First, interventions tend to take a “wellness” approach, focusing on individual solutions. Second, interventions tend to rely on generic content from corporate and nonprofit organizations to manage faculty mental health. Third, despite messaging that encourages help-seeking, faculty experience pressure to maintain productivity while ill. Drawing on insights from the literature on neoliberal managerialism and the gendered organization of the university, we show how the focus on the generic individual obfuscates the health consequences of rising expectations, high work demands, and the gendered organization of university labor. Meaningful interventions must address workload and work conditions, while considering the health consequences of the gendered organization of university work.

Keywords

University faculty mental health interventions wellness neoliberalism managerialism gender

Introduction

Recently, there has been an increase in the attention paid to the mental health of university faculty. Mainstream and social media have covered public disclosures of mental ill-health among a number of high-profile academic leaders,¹ and university and faculty trade publications have reported the harmful health impacts on faculty of increased work demands, especially in the context of working through the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic lockdowns.^2,3 Rising mental health concerns among faculty have pushed universities across Canada to pay more attention to and invest in programs and other supports aimed at promoting faculty mental health. While it is clear that universities both need to and are attempting to address the mental health of its faculty, it is important to pay attention to how universities do so.

Canadian universities typically address faculty mental health through individually focused wellness services and programs, such as mental health awareness campaigns and mindfulness training. A growing body of international research, however, has documented the negative mental health impacts of more systemic issues of heavy workloads and rising performance expectations⁴ attributed to neoliberal restructuring of universities towards market interests.⁵ While the version of neoliberalism in Canadian universities may be less austere than in other jurisdictions, a number of worrying trends have emerged,⁶ including an increased reliance on contractual, mostly part-time teaching instructors in place of full-time, tenured faculty,⁷ a rise in the number of highly paid administrative positions,⁸ and cuts to public funding accompanied by a rise in performance-based funding models.⁹ The acceleration of digital and remote working arrangements—especially since the start of the pandemic—has also served to blur the boundaries between work and non-work time and spaces.^10,11 These trends restructure how the work of the university gets done and who does what. They embed neoliberal managerial practices “to extract greater value from their [faculty] labor in the delivery of the commodity called ‘education.’”¹² ^{p 496−7} These managerial practices intersect with longstanding gender and other systemic inequalities with harmful consequences for women, particularly on their mental health.¹³

While there is an emerging body of research documenting the high prevalence of mental ill-health among university faculty, less scholarly attention has been paid to how universities have responded to growing concerns about faculty mental health. In this paper, we examine typical faculty mental health interventions in the context of neoliberal restructuring of universities and their relationship to the management of academic work through interviews with academic workers (AWs) and organizational representatives (ORs). We pay particular attention to how gender informs the form and content of such interventions. We begin by situating our research in the broader empirical and theoretical literatures on faculty mental health and the impact of neoliberal managerialism and longstanding systemic inequalities on the work organization and working conditions for university faculty. Drawing on this literature, we show that although these interventions may benefit some individual faculty, they ultimately serve neoliberal managerialism by making faculty responsible for figuring out how to manage stress within a work culture and structure that encourages overwork at the expense of their well-being. Furthermore, typical interventions tend to obscure how mental health is affected by the gendered organization of university labor.

Faculty Mental Health in the Context of Neoliberal Management

Experiences of mental ill-health are common and widespread among faculty. A 2017 RAND Europe reported that 37% of AWs identified having “common mental health disorders.”¹⁴ ^{p 55} A pan-Canadian survey of AWs found 64% of respondents reported mental ill-health at some point during their career, with anxiety (35%), distress (28%), burnout (22%), and depression (13%) most frequently reported.¹⁵ Similarly, a review of the literature found “anxiety, depression, stress, and burnout” were the most commonly reported issues among faculty.¹⁶ ^{p 9} Another review of the literature found that university faculty reported “less job satisfaction and extremely low levels of psychological health” compared to other professions.¹⁷ ^{p 488} Canadian studies have reported higher rates of psychological stress among academic staff (13%) than other white-collar workers,¹⁸ ^{p 256} and higher rates of self-reported work stress than non-professionals.¹⁹ Hence, there is a high prevalence of mental ill-health among university faculty, and, in some cases, a higher rate than those found among the general population or other professions.

A growing body of research links faculty mental ill-health to deteriorating working conditions and work reorganization in universities that has been occurring over the last couple of decades. Research has attributed negative health impacts to increased job demands and work intensification (e.g., rising expectations to publish more, teaching larger classes with fewer supports).^4,16,17,20 Increased workloads and the adoption of new technologies (e.g., digital platforms) have contributed to faculty working longer hours and extending work into non-work times and spaces,^5,17,21 producing a “never-ending shift.”¹⁰

Research on the university systems in Australia, the United Kingdom and elsewhere attributes such deteriorating working conditions and their harmful impacts on faculty health and the wider academic community to broader neoliberal political economic trends.^5,22–25 In particular, significant cuts to core funding have contributed to a reconfiguring of public universities as markets to sell education and research through the adoption of managerial strategies that, simply put, aim to do more with less. This new managerialism has included cutting faculty and staff positions and resources, casualizing academic labor, and reducing autonomy characteristic of traditional academic work through increased surveillance and control over faculty work through mechanisms such as new and increased forms of auditing.^6,12 For faculty, managerialism produces stress and anxiety, disrupts collegiality, and encourages competition, especially in contexts in which such mechanisms are directly tied to demonstrating the criteria for tenure and promotion or to maintaining one's soft-funded tenured position.^25–27 For those who are precariously employed, job insecurity itself is a main source of stress.^28,29

The impacts of neoliberal managerialism intersect with longstanding gender inequalities with harmful impacts on the mental health of cisgender women, transgender, and gender non-conforming faculty. There is evidence that neoliberal managerialism disproportionately increases precarity for women and faculty in feminized fields.¹³ How universities measure, value and reward performance can reinforce gender and other systemic inequalities.^30,31 For example, women, racialized and other marginalized faculty are more likely to engage in invisible and undervalued kinds of labor such as committee and mentoring work.^32,33 Additionally, women must navigate differential treatment and expectations by colleagues and students.³⁴ Transgender faculty experience microagressions in the university workplace,³⁵ further adding to already heavy burdens. Among faculty, women are more likely than men to report stress from family demands. Women are more likley to engage in unpaid care work that affects their productivity and career progression.^31,36,37 The impacts of gender inequality in the heterosexual family were exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, as evidenced by a decline in publications among women academics.³⁸

A few notable studies have focused on the responses of universities to calls for addressing mental ill-health. For example, Gill and Donaghue³⁹ analyzed three types of mental health tools and services aimed at faculty, including advice blogs written by faculty, apps and software that aim to manage faculty time and work, and well-being services such as counseling and workshops. They argued that such interventions inappropriately place responsibility on faculty to adapt to the changing and growing work demands in the neoliberal university by developing resiliency. Similarly, Reuter⁴⁰ examined newsletters produced by the Employee Assistance Program (EAP) at one Canadian university. She showed that the content of the newsletters discursively individualizes structural problems and makes faculty responsible for their own health and academic work, as well as those of their colleagues. This constructs “the responsible professor” whose job is to keep performing. She concluded that EAPs are a mechanism for carrying out the university's neoliberal managerial agenda. In their discussion of Australian universities’ responses to faculty mental health, Tregear et al.²⁷ made the point that neoliberally-managed universities have a disincentive to address mental ill-health among faculty in ways that would require changes to working conditions and the organization of work. The authors argued that neoliberal values as manifested in new managerial approaches frame distress as a matter of performance management in order to maintain compliance among faculty.

Our paper contributes to this scholarship on university interventions aimed at faculty mental health by shifting the focus to the experiences of academic and non-AWs who through their employment have knowledge about the formation, delivery, and consequences of policies and programs to address mental health in Canadian universities. We have assembled the working knowledge of faculty and representatives to examine how mental health interventions operate in the context of the neoliberal university. University workplaces are sites where faculty have traditionally experienced autonomy and control over their work, and at the same time, have been characterized by a gendered organization of labor. Framed by this context, our questions are: How do mental health interventions aimed at faculty address their health and well-being? What role do the interventions play in the management of academic labor?

Methods

We draw on interviews with AWs (which include faculty and researchers employed at Canadian universities) and ORs (which include nonacademic staff and administrators employed at Canadian universities and by faculty unions) carried out as part of the Healthy Professional Worker Partnership, a pan-Canadian multiuniversity, multidisciplinary, and multimethod research partnership to examine mental health, leaves of absence, and return to work across seven professions, including university faculty.^a Our qualitative interviews with ORs began as part of the pilot study in 2017 with others completed in 2022. Our interviews with AWs were conducted in 2020 and 2021. Although this research was conducted before and through the COVID-19 lockdown periods, the focus of our interviews was on how universities respond to faculty mental health, in general. Our research received ethics approval from the University of Ottawa's ethics review board and the ethics review boards of all 15 participating universities. All interviews were semi-structured, conducted in English or French, by phone or Zoom, usually by two members of the research team, and were recorded and transcribed verbatim. Most interviews lasted about one hour, though some ran much longer.

We interviewed 20 ORs including 6 nonacademic staff in administrative offices (e.g., human resource staff, equity officers), 4 academic administrators, and 10 nonacademic union staff or faculty members who served as elected union executive members or on union committees (e.g., grievance officers). Representatives were recruited directly through an invitation sent to their publicly available email addresses. Invitations were also sent via our partner organizations and participating universities. The sample was drawn from those working in universities across Canada, though primarily from Ontario (n = 13). We collected publicly available information about each participant's employment role or office. Representatives were asked to respond to questions based on their role at the university. In this paper, we focused on the responses they provided to questions about the factors that contributed to mental ill-health, workplace mental health policies and programs in their universities, and their observations about the role of gender in interventions or the importance of gender in mental health considerations.

We interviewed 34 AWs working across a range of disciplines (including social sciences and humanities, medicine, biological sciences, management, etc.) in Canadian universities. These included comprehensive universities, universities that teach primarily undergraduate students, and universities in urban and more remote regions. However, most interviewees worked in universities in Ontario. Participants included 13 tenured professors, eight tenure track faculty, three postdoctoral researchers, and three contractual or part-time faculty. In addition, we interviewed two emeritus professors and two individuals who worked in other teaching/research/clinical roles at universities.^b Interview participants ranged in age and career stage, from new entry to retired, and some faculty had experience in a variety of administrative or other service roles at their universities.

Twenty-one of the participants self-identified as women and 13 as men. The sample was largely white, with five participants identifying as racialized. Most participants identified as heterosexual, with seven participants identifying as part of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community.^c Most participants (N = 27) reported being married or partnered, and 20 participants reported having or living with children. Faculty were recruited through a crowd-sourced Canada-wide online bilingual survey in which participants could indicate their interest in participating in a follow-up interview; they were paid $20 each for their participation. The demographic characteristics of our sample most likely reflect our nonprobability sampling strategy. In this paper, we draw on responses AWs provided to questions about their experiences and perceptions of mental health interventions and support aimed at faculty in their universities, as well as of the sources of workplace stressors.

Analysis

Interview transcripts were read and coded by multiple members of the research team at different stages of the research process, using NVivo software as well as Word and Excel documents. Analytic memos were used to start linking the coding to the literature and key concepts (e.g., managerialism). Our qualitative analysis presented in this paper focuses on mapping out the form (target) and content (focus) of mental health interventions, as well as how these interventions and responses to them are shaped by “extra-local” processes.⁴¹ The analysis process for the broader project included writing two short documents summarizing the main themes and patterns (e.g., types of interventions, work-related stressors), as well as noting particularities, exceptions and comparative differences across the OR interviews and AW interviews, respectively. Subsequent rounds of analysis included coding experiences and processes (e.g., implementation of mental health interventions, barriers to accessing mental health interventions) and subjective and affective aspects (e.g., self-assessments of mental health, feelings elicited by wellness and mental health interventions). We looked for patterns and relationships among the codes and connected them to theoretical concepts.

Finally, the authors' different experiences and roles in university contexts have contributed to our analysis. In particular, at the time of writing, three of the authors are tenured professors at different Canadian universities and identify as cisgender women. One of the authors has taken a leave of absence for mental health reasons and regularly uses EAP mental health services available through her university, another has served in administrative leadership positions, and another has played an active role in her faculty union.

Results

In this section, we describe three main features of university interventions that emerged in our interviews, and their impact on the work and health of AWs. First, interventions tend to take an “employee wellness” approach, focusing on the individual as the source of the problem and identifying solutions such as changing one's behavior or thinking to better manage stressful work. Second, the university tends to outsource responsibility for its employees’ mental health, relying on generic and de-contextualized content produced by corporate and nonprofit organizations. Third, despite university messaging that encourages open discussion about mental ill-health and help-seeking, faculty with mental ill-health experience pressure to keep working and to maintain productivity. We show how employee wellness interventions operate as tools for managing academic work by making individual faculty members responsible for figuring out how to adapt to, cope with, and manage stress, rather than addressing structural sources of stress, including workload and gendered work organization. Moreover, we show how this failure to account for structural sources of stress obfuscates the mental health consequences of being overworked and how these consequences are gendered.

Employee Wellness Programs: Individualizing Mental Health

According to interview participants, universities most commonly offered mental health services and tools that fall under the “employee wellness” umbrella, such as online resources, guided nature walks, lunchtime yoga, workshops on mindfulness, mental health awareness campaigns and training, and short-term EAPs. Many wellness services and programs do not distinguish between faculty and nonacademic or administrative staff. They focus on providing employees with tools to manage and alleviate stress and strategies to better manage productivity or interactions at work. The aim is to enable employees to get back to doing the work of the university by developing skills or strategies that they presumably lack. The choice to take part in such opportunities is usually left to the individual employee, as OR09 put it, “if you want the tools, you can find them somewhere.” However, a common observation by ORs was that faculty are a difficult group to engage. Interviews with faculty point to a number of barriers to engaging in wellness programming, especially in the context of heavy workloads and working long hours:

They [the university] send out these emails, like wellness at work. You know, we have a walking group during lunch hours or whatever … And I know it's not right to eat at my desk and to do emails, and I know that's not a mindful practice. But I might zone out every once in a while, and go through a meditation. Like I was having a panicked feeling a couple of weeks ago and I was like, damn it, just shut up and do the meditation and felt 100 percent better. (AW29)

In this example, AW29 describes trying to be mindful and do a meditation as prescribed by the “wellness at work” emails she had received. Like the few faculty participants who did take part in wellness services, she found the practice useful. Her description also presents a tension between recognizing that eating at her desk at lunchtime is not a healthy practice and needing that time to respond to email. In this case, the university is, on the one hand, encouraging wellness through its lunch walking group, and on the other, making it difficult for faculty to partake due to heavy workload. Ultimately, the “choice” presented to faculty—to take part in the walk (and thereby taking care of one's mental health) or to continue answering email—is evidence of the kind of shifting of responsibility for one's health that scholars like Reuter⁴⁰ and Gill and Donahue³⁹ have described. The “choice” is not real, or is at best, constrained.

Some faculty offered pointed critiques of such wellness programs that disregard the structural basis of overwork and instead orient faculty towards individualized strategies of self-improvement. As one faculty member put it:

Those very individualistic, you know, mindfulness focused activities that don't address the root of the issue. I think those can actually cause more harm sometimes because of blame. It places the responsibility on the individual and not the system. (AW32)

Here, AW32 points to a problematic assumption underpinning employee wellness programs and services, namely that the individual faculty member is assumed to be the source of the problem by being unable to handle stress. In fact, the working conditions and the organization of work, which cause the stress, are the source of the problem. If the problem lies in the individual, stress can be managed by changing one's behavior or thinking. However, taking the time to join a lunch-time walk or engage in mindful practice does nothing to reduce the number of email requiring a response. AW32 goes further to say that positioning individual faculty as the source of the problem creates harm in itself by encouraging self-blame when faculty members feel stressed. This self-blame is illustrated in the above quote by AW29 when she told herself to “shut up and do the meditation.” In this case, she is blaming herself for feeling panicked and for not coping well with work stressors.

Non-academic ORs who developed and delivered wellness programming as part of their employment also understood its limits. As OR01 told us:

I think we know the systemic issues that they [faculty] are facing in terms of whether they are tenure track or not, and the pressures that they feel, and constantly being on, and working all hours of the day, and that sort of thing. Working within that system, what can we do to support? If it's not a lunch and learn, or it's not yoga at lunch time, what is it and what would be the most impactful? (OR01, emphasis added)

Despite being aware of the impacts of faculty overwork, staff who are responsible for mental health promotion and training have limited and specific mandates, which largely exclude changing how academic work gets done. Instead of the university addressing structural sources of faculty stress identified by the representative quoted here, faculty are presented with a suite of employee wellness services that tell faculty if they are experiencing stress or anxiety about their work, they just need to be more mindful, do more yoga, or attend another workshop.

Outsourcing Mental Health Services

There is variation in terms of dedicated mental health resources and infrastructure for faculty across universities. In some cases, universities have dedicated staff and resources to develop, implement, and report on the uptake of mental health services. More commonly, universities outsource responsibility for their employees’ mental health. Services and tools are offered to faculty and staff through health insurance partners of universities. Universities also tend to draw on and pay for mental health services and resources produced in the corporate and non-profit sectors, for example Telus Health, Bell's Let's Talk, Mindwell-U, the Canadian Mental Health Association, and the Mental Health Commission of Canada. The promotional material on the websites of such organizations may appeal to employers by making a business case for employee wellness and mental health programing that includes reducing absenteeism and increasing productivity. In some cases, universities have partnered with such organizations to deliver mental health programming to faculty, staff, and management, and are working towards receiving organizational certification, as one representative told us:

It's a whole process of writing an application to demonstrate how we've met the criteria and then they have a team that comes in and conducts focus groups and identifies if we are doing what we say we are doing. (OR01)

For universities, being awarded mental health certification by an outside organization may be part of their branding and strategy for recruitment of faculty and other academic staff:

It's really interesting that some of the workplaces are now laying out when they’re recruiting that “we have excellent mental health practices in our workplace” … I mean, they’re starting to promote this now as a way of recruitment. (OR03)

In addition to being a supplemental recruitment strategy, through their training and certification programs, corporate and non-profit organizations are shaping how universities define and approach mental health in the workplace:

I think it's open to a lot of interpretation and so having the guidance of the criteria ... and knowing that it really mirrors the National Standard and it's kind of a stepped approach to getting us there. (OR01)

Such corporate and non-profit organizations offer a range of services including one-off lunch-time presentations to university audiences and more formal, and in some cases, credentialized training. One of the goals of this type of training is to help individuals recognize signs of mental ill-health and provide support to someone who may be experiencing mental ill-health:

There's ... another program that's offered … anybody can take it, but we really encourage supervisors and leaders to take it. That's basically again, recognizing when there might be a mental health issue, they learn to identify it, there's some general information about what the various health issues are that someone might be dealing with, what the signs and symptoms are, and then how you would address that with someone as well. (OR16, emphasis added)

It was not uncommon for faculty and ORs alike to speak to the value of such awareness training. In fact, in the interviews, faculty often identified a need for mental health awareness initiatives as a key promising practice. By encouraging “supervisors and leaders” in the university workplace to engage in training, universities appear to accept some responsibility for the mental health of their employees, including faculty. At the same time, this responsibility tends to be placed onto individuals who complete the training, perhaps those in academic leadership or non-academic management positions, who are in turn charged with identifying and managing mental health in the workplace. Additionally, the content of such approaches almost exclusively focuses on individuals as the target of intervention. For example, some faculty and faculty-turned-administrators reported playing active roles integrating or implementing what they learned about mental health into their teaching, supervisory work, and managerial roles. Usually, this meant having on-hand information regarding available resources (e.g., EAP, counseling) for faculty experiencing mental ill-health, or talking openly about mental health. In these cases, interview participants described such efforts as a response to very real problems—faculty (and student) distress and other related problems (e.g., deteriorating collegiality) they observed and experienced in their home departments and faculties. However, the solutions—individual leaders who have received training or certification targeting individual faculty (and students) with informational resources—illustrate the limitations of the approaches of corporate and non-profit organizations in addressing mental health in university workplaces. To put more directly, the focus of mental health training tends to encourage supervisors and leaders to target individual faculty experiencing distress rather than address workloads and structural conditions producing work-related conflict and distress.

Furthermore, wellness programs and services offered to faculty typically assume a “generic” individual employee as the focus of intervention and do not tend to take an intentional gender or intersectional lens. This generic design reflects in part the need for corporate and nonprofit frameworks, programs, and content to work across different workplaces. Additionally, a key message is that mental ill-health is something that everyone can experience, as OR01 told us: “people recognize that mental health does affect everyone in some way.” This message is common in campaigns aimed at destigmatizing mental ill-health. However, it assumes incorrectly that, for example, gender-neutral language promotes equality, rather than a gender-informed approach that promotes equity. Equality approaches treat individuals the same and ignore the ways that structural oppressions operate to produce different experiences and disadvantage for members of marginalized groups. In the context of the workplace, mental health, as with physical health, is mediated by systems of oppression and inequality that shape who does what kinds of work, with consequences for experiences of work and mental health.^13,30–33 To illustrate, a common theme across the AW interviews was that, compared to men faculty, women tend to do more of the undervalued and invisible academic work, including supporting colleagues and students, and this work tends to be emotionally taxing. As AW06 put it, “And I feel like … that sort of emotional work is something that female colleagues deal with in a way that maybe male colleagues don't”. Without an intersectional lens approach, mental health and wellness interventions risk obscuring how gender and other systemic inequalities shape the organization of and values embedded in academic work and the associated work experiences of and health impacts on marginalized faculty.⁴² Women faculty recounted in interviews numerous experiences of routine sexism and paternalism throughout their careers. Take, for example, the career advice given to AW12 when she was on the tenure track by her Dean:

By saying to me, you know, I'm going to give you the same advice that I would give my daughters. And then proceeded to tell me that I basically wasn't working hard enough. And I needed to just buckle down and prove him wrong. … But the whole paternalistic attitude and the produce, produce, produce emphasis.

In this case, the Dean's “fatherly” advice illustrates a form of paternalism. While the message to work harder and be productive is a common refrain in academia, this example shows how such messaging is not gender neutral. One of the risks of gender-neutral mental health interventions is that faculty who identify as women and have working lives that are very much shaped by gender (as in the quote above) receive the message when they seek help for mental health that their gender is not supposed to matter, and worse, because the interventions lack an intersectional lens, women are encouraged to adjust and adapt to unfair and sexist work environments. It is equally important that gender-informed interventions be guided by equity- and justice-oriented frameworks that understand such gendered experiences are the consequences of systemic sexism, as opposed to essentialist approaches that, for example, frame women as psychologically weaker and perpetuate harmful, sexist stereotypes. In other words, it is imperative that those involved in the design and implementation of mental health interventions have training in equity- and justice-oriented approaches that recognize how systemic inequalities contribute to overwork and greater burdens for women and marginalized faculty.

Individual Faculty Managing Mental Health and Performance

No matter how well-intended, programs that rely on training individuals in leadership or management positions to look for individuals with signs of mental ill-health or offer support to faculty at their place of employment carry a risk of stigmatizing faculty. Even where universities seemingly commit to efforts to destigmatize mental ill-health, the message to faculty tends to be it is okay to talk about their mental health, but they still need to “get the work done”. As one faculty member put it:

Not like I didn't feel like I could talk about my own mental health. But, you know, it was more of a we're okay, we're open. We're accepting da-da-da. But you better get the work done, right? (AW18, emphasis added)

Here we see the hollowness of university wellness approaches that promote messages to destigmatize talking about mental health but where little is done to address underlying work load issues contributing to faculty stress. In fact, the pressure to keep working while experiencing mental ill-health—itself a workplace stressor—encourages individual faculty to manage their mental health on their own. Many of our faculty participants referenced having flexibility in their work and schedules, and therefore being able to escape attention or hide their ill-health from colleagues and supervisors by showing up to work and continuing to work while ill, using sabbatical to recuperate, and working from home. As AW06 explained, because she continued to work while experiencing a stressful family situation, she escaped attention from her colleagues and supervisor: “And certainly, my productivity has been good. So I think if it was suffering more than, you know, I think I probably would have gotten a bit more kind of attention.”

Some faculty members worried that the stigma associated with mental ill-health, including seeking help, meant they could be perceived by the institution and colleagues as “problems” or not cut out for academia. They raised concerns about the potential consequences that such perceptions could have on their employment. In discussing a mental health peer support program at her university, an administrator told us:

I'm very conscious of my position, and I'm conscious of people worrying that somehow, there's going to be kind of blowback on them about their jobs or what not. So, this was very much, you know, peer support (OR20).

In this case, the organization of mental health supports for faculty through peer-based delivery was in part meant to circumvent faculty concerns about the potential stigmatizing or damaging employment impacts of seeking help. At the same time, the concern noted about potential “blowback” of accessing information and resources about mental health on faculty employment is understandable, and indeed justified, given the ways that individual mental health and job performance get linked in management discourse and practice. As an OR (OR15) told us:

It's always a question that we ask when someone's presenting the performance issue is, you know, what else is going on for you? Like, let's hear, you know, why are you kind of, at this point of frustration, what's been happening? Is there anything we can do, to put in place that would support you and not having you have this outcome? And so that's another place that they use that and we are quite assertive in that, I guess. You know, and making sure that people understand what our legal duty and responsibility is as an employer, so that we can encourage people to do it [take leave] more. (emphasis added)

Here, evidence of a “performance issue” (which remains undefined) becomes a potential sign of mental ill-health (“what else is going on for you?”) and is mobilized to justify management intervention. This quote illustrates how performance gets used as evidence of mental ill-health and to justify surveillance of faculty through the employer's legal duty to inquire. And the consequences of framing performance as a measure of one's health status—as opposed to seeing mental ill-health or “performance issues” as produced by work overload and rising performance expectations—can be far-reaching, including being placed on mandatory leave:

You know, if they're underperforming, others are having to pick up that work. If they're underperforming, then they're typically in some kind of performance management discussion with their leader and that's uncomfortable for everybody. They might be angry and lashing out at colleagues. So, you know, I think, fortunately, I haven't had to do this very often at [university name]. But I have, you know, put people on mandatory leave and required to have independent medical, when they have, when they clearly have issues that they're not acknowledging, right? (OR17, emphasis added)

In this case, “underperforming” is taken as a sign of a problem with the individual faculty member (e.g., “angry and lashing out”), with potentially disciplinary consequences. Undoubtedly, there are cases when performance indicates ill-health, and mental health surely impacts work productivity and collegiality. At the same time, positioning performance as something going on with the psychology of faculty obfuscates the mental health consequences of being overworked, and directs attention away from structural issues, such as understaffing and under-resourcing that further intensify academic workloads and produce tension among colleagues. In other words, interpersonal conflict and unfair workloads, taken here as consequences of something going on with an individual faculty member, may in fact be consequences of neoliberal management of academic labor. A faculty member working in a well-funded academic unit made this observation about the relationship between collegiality and being well-resourced: “it's relatively well funded … So there's sort of control over the budget and hiring processes internally. And I think that kind of cuts back on drama” (AW07).

Additionally, a focus on the individual faculty member as the source of the “performance issues” masks other contextual factors that impact the health and wellbeing of some faculty, and may contribute to less favorable performance assessments. For example, gendered divisions of labor in the academic workplace mean that compared to men, women do more of the “academic housework”³³ that is less valued but necessary for the running of the university. The undervaluing of this work can translate into less favorable performance assessments, and at the same time, such “academic housework” can be emotionally exhausting. Furthermore, the broader gendered organization of care work creates tensions for women faculty between trying to manage caregiving responsibilities at home and in their personal lives, and their duties as faculty at the university. One faculty member who worked with her faculty union told us:

When I look around me, women are doing a lot of service work in their universities and in their unions. And they're doing a lot of the helping. And I think that adds to that burden. And that stress, they also do a lot of … home care, caregiving. And they do a lot of helping at home too (OR07).

As this quote shows, gender divisions of labor and inequalities in the heteronormative family translate into disproportionate care work for women, leaving women faculty to figure out how to manage or “balance” the sometimes conflicting demands of work and life everyday. As AW28 explained:

So typically, my work day starts, ideally at 8:30, when my daughter goes to day care at 8:30. But often I have meetings before that I call into while trying to feed her breakfast and doing all that other … So thankfully, everything is not in person, which is actually much more flexible for me.

Discussion, Implications and Further Research

Similar to Tregear et al.,²⁷ Gill and Donaghue³⁹ and Reuter,⁴⁰ we have shown how mental health wellness initiatives operate in contradictory ways in the context of the neoliberal university. This paper makes an important contribution to this emerging literature by turning the focus to and documenting faculty and ORs’ experiences of mental health interventions and by paying particular attention to how gender informs the form and content of such interventions. By starting from their experiences, we have documented the impacts of these interventions on the work and health of AWs. Our analysis shows that faculty and ORs value wellness and mental health awareness services and programs. Some participants recognized the direct and indirect health benefits of dedicating time to take part in exercises like yoga at lunch or to practice mindfulness activities. Others reported integrating or implementing some aspects of mental health awareness campaigns or training into their teaching, supervisory work, and managerial roles. Moreover, when asked to identify a promising practice and to talk about what universities should do to address faculty mental health, a common response among AWs and representatives was the need for mental health awareness among faculty and administration. At the same time, and consistent with the literature on mental health interventions aimed at faculty,^27,39,40 our analysis shows that wellness and awareness interventions aimed at faculty mental health in Canadian universities serve neoliberal managerialism by orienting faculty towards self-improvement in order to keep working and may in fact produce further harm. In other words, while wellness interventions may look like organizational responsibility, they ignore the structural and cultural bases of workplace stressors and the form and content of interventions reinforce a managerial focus on individual faculty as “the problem.”

Shifting the Focus of Interventions from Individual Responsibility to Structural Issues

There is a disconnect between what the research shows are the sources of workplace stress and the focus of typical mental health and wellness interventions aimed at university faculty. While there is a growing body of research demonstrating that faculty stress, anxiety, and burnout are due to heavy workload, working long hours and rising expectations regarding productivity,^4,16,17,20 the wellness and mental health interventions described in this paper tend to make faculty members responsible for their own health. They direct attention away from making changes to work organization and conditions. Rather than taking an approach that offers tools and strategies to help individual faculty members cope with or adapt to work demands and pressures, meaningful mental health interventions must be informed by evidence and focus on addressing structural and work organization issues that contribute to overwork, including understaffing, under-resourcing, and rising performance expectations. This focus avoids blaming individual faculty members who “choose” not to engage in wellness programming because they lack the time and energy for yet another activity on top of already heavy workloads. It mitigates pressure to continue to work while ill. To address these structural issues, it is necessary to start with sufficient levels of funding for public universities so that they can support and sustain healthy working and learning environments. Funding should include tenure-track, full-time positions and support staff positions. Research in Australia²³ has demonstrated a relationship between cuts to government funding of public universities and the mental ill-health of AWs. Appropriate levels of staffing ensure there are enough people to do the work of the university without compromising the health and safety of staff.

Shifting Responsibility for Mental Health from Human Resources to Labor Relations

Our research found that mental health interventions tend to be outsourced to the corporate and non-profit sectors. They are typically undertaken by employees in human resources departments who do not have responsibility for faculty workloads, performance expectations, and other faculty stressors. At the same time, some interventions are aimed at training individuals in leadership or supervisory positions in mental health awareness. Faculty understandably have concerns about the potential impact on their employment of being stigmatized or identified as a “problem.” In other words, those tasked with addressing mental health among faculty (e.g., HR employees) often have little power to address work-related stressors, while others (e.g., academic administrators) have power to evaluate performance and impose discipline. To address the underlying structural issues related to overwork requires a shift to the labor relations process. Universities have a legal duty to accommodate their employees. Collective agreements tend to have language that includes mental health in leave provisions for sickness and disability. Faculty unions tend to address faculty mental health primarily through the individual grievance process (e.g., in cases of discrimination based on mental health disability) and by informing members about their rights. While these are important protections and benefits for workers, we suggest a more deliberate centering of faculty mental health in collective bargaining. In universities where faculty and other academic workers are unionized, collective bargaining is the method by which the main sources of work-related stressors, workload and work conditions, are addressed. By centering mental health in collective bargaining, both the university and union can move the focus away from the individuals per se, and towards negotiating language that prioritizes fair and equitable workloads.

Taking a Gender Lens

We found that wellness and mental health interventions implemented in universities tend to take a gender-neutral approach, assuming that everyone and anyone can benefit from the tools, services, and training offered. The underlying assumption is likely that a gender-neutral approach promotes equality. However, such an approach ignores the organization of university work by gender. Compared to men, women disproportionately perform undervalued and often emotionally taxing work.^32,33 A gender-neutral approach assumes incorrectly that faculty members of all genders experience mental ill-health and stressors similarly. Taking a gender-informed approach to mental health interventions accounts for the mental health consequences of the gendered organization of university work and its impacts on issues related to workload, performance assessment, and work-life balance. For example, if universities take an equity approach to valuing and rewarding academic housework such as mentoring and committee work in tenure and promotion decisions, we would expect to see women and other marginalized faculty more fairly represented across professorial ranks. Equally important, over time, we would expect to see a shift towards a fairer gendered division of academic housework labor. Furthermore, an equity approach would mean providing adequate accommodation and leave provisions for family care work, as well as affordable, high quality and flexible child care for employees. Providing accommodations, leave benefits and childcare to academic workers would mitigate some of the family care burden that women faculty members disproportionately shoulder. From the point of view of public health and occupational health, they are sound interventions aimed at fostering healthy work environments.

One of the limitations of our paper is its focus primarily on the experiences of cisgender faculty which is largely due to the demographic characteristics of our sample. Furthermore, we have focused on gender but we know that other systemic inequalities such as racism shape the work and health contexts for faculty in significant ways. Finally, our paper focuses primarily on the experiences of tenure and tenure-track faculty, and not contractually employed faculty, for whom precarity itself is a main stressor. These gaps are important areas for future research.

Conclusion

Our research contributes to the scholarship on faculty mental health by focusing on the under-researched topic of interventions and by drawing on the work experiences of faculty and organization representatives who have first-hand knowledge in how mental health interventions operate in universities. We demonstrate a relationship between wellness and mental health awareness interventions and the management of academic work. Put more directly, we have shown how wellness- and awareness-oriented interventions support the work of neoliberal managerialism that aims “to extract greater value from their [faculty] labor,”¹² ^{p 496–7} and is in fact playing a role in the reorganization of academic work. We conclude that meaningful interventions to support faculty mental health must start with an understanding of how the labor process and gender inequalities impact faculty experiences of academic work and their health. Wellness programs, when done well, provide a, sometimes necessary and beneficial, temporary fix for employee mental health. However, wellness programs seldom, if ever, address the key role that workplace stressors have in harming mental health. If universities are truly committed to improving the mental health of faculty, more than a surface solution that improves external reputation is necessary. Universities, across the board, need to consider the role of workload, productivity expectations, and reward systems in mental health and begin the process of addressing such root issues.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank to Mylène Shankland and Jelena Atanackovic who assisted with conducting interviews.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethical Approval

Ethics approval was obtained first from the University of Ottawa (S-05-19-2508) and subsequently from 15 Canadian universities with participating researchers in the study.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Development Partnership Grant (890-2016-3029) and Partnership Grant for Healthy and Productive Work (895-2018-4014).

ORCID iDs

Nicole G. Power

Janet Mantler

Ivy L. Bourgeault

Sam E. Morton

Notes

Author Biographies

Nicole Power is a Professor in the Sociology Department at Memorial University. Her research examines health and safety in diverse work contexts including fisheries, corrections, skilled trades, high-risk work, and academia.

Janet Mantler is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Carleton University. Her research examines the role of work stress in personal health outcomes across all career stages and how to improve workplaces to have a positive impact on employee well-being.

Ivy L. Bourgeault is a Professor in the School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies at the University of Ottawa and Research Chair in Gender, Diversity and the Professions. She led the Healthy Professional Worker Partnership.

Christine Tulk is a fifth-year PhD student in organizational psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Her primary research interests focus on understanding contextual factors that can have a systemic influence on mental health and well-being in the workplace.

Natasha Ball has a diverse background in program management and policy development, with experience across health research and communications. She currently serves as a Program Officer in Program Design and Policy with the Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP) at the National Research Council Canada (NRC).

Sam E. Morton is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at Memorial University. She worked as a Research Assistant and Trainee on the gender and mental health in the academy case study, which was part of the Healthy Professional Worker Partnership

Christina Young is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Rural Health Studies in the Faculty of Medicine at Memorial University of Newfoundland and a Mitacs intern at the Carbonear Institute for Rural Reach and Innovation by the Sea.

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An Analysis of University Mental Health Initiatives Aimed at Academic Workers

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Faculty Mental Health in the Context of Neoliberal Management

Methods

Analysis

Results

Employee Wellness Programs: Individualizing Mental Health

Outsourcing Mental Health Services

Individual Faculty Managing Mental Health and Performance

Discussion, Implications and Further Research

Shifting the Focus of Interventions from Individual Responsibility to Structural Issues

Shifting Responsibility for Mental Health from Human Resources to Labor Relations

Taking a Gender Lens

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Ethical Approval

Funding

ORCID iDs

Notes

Author Biographies

References