Framing Mental Health for Student Success

Fatima Rahiman

The silent or second pandemic – a phrase increasingly recognised as the spill-over of Covid-19’s impact on public mental health - particularly that of young adults, women and people living with young children, is high on the agenda globally. Siyaphumelela, in its bid to mitigate challenges to student success for which mental health is paramount, understands this need and has begun work, through its recently constituted workstream, to address this issue in the higher education sector.

“Mental health in an unequal world” - the theme of the past October’s World Mental Health day, cast a spotlight on the inequities or precarity that accelerates this second pandemic. In particular, in South Africa with the socioeconomic legacy of apartheid and inequality dynamics – termed the ‘’manufactured viruses’’, the Mental Health Awareness day spawned a host of media articles, peppered with sobering statistics about the vast number of affected South Africans with mental health issues before the Covid pandemic, and how this figure has since been exacerbated by the pandemic.

Figure 1: Mental Health Statistics as compiled by the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG)

The higher education sector has of course not been spared, compounded by a host of factors which include domestic conflict, gender-based violence, food insecurity, financial issues, racism and classism[1]. A recent study conducted by Higher Health, a Department of Higher Education Training (DHET) agency working with Universities South Africa (USAf) and the South African College and Principals Organisation (SACPO), reported that over 65% of students have ‘mild to severe psychological distress’ with students more at risk of suicidal behaviour than the general population. In fact, chilling data around the rate of student and academic suicides globally, with suicidal ideation in the South African higher education sector, reported as being one the highest in the world, calls for an urgent prioritisation of support for mental health.

The mental health workstream, co-ordinated by Saide as part of the Siyaphumelela programme, is comprised of partner institution members. The purpose of this workstream is to explore issues related to student success, of which mental health has been identified as an integral aspect. The remit of this services forum is to identify student needs and to align these with the design of possible interventions which can be refined and ultimately developed into a service workshop for the Siyaphumelela Network. The workstream is led by two co-chairs from Siyaphumelela partner institutions viz. Ms Laetitia Permall, Director for Student Support Services at the UWC and Anne Lunsky, Head of Department for Counselling and Career Development Services at Wits.

In October 2021 a workshop was held for the mental health workstream forum. The purpose was to identify and discuss issues that could become the focus of a national service offering. The agenda also included an opportunity to discuss potential challenges that might be faced by institutions in implementing any of the approaches shared in the presentations, as well as a chance to identify data analytics indicators that SA Institutions could adopt to monitor proposed mental health interventions.

Kicking off the discussion was a presentation of the Wits Mental Health Strategy in which its multi-stakeholder input ecosystem was profiled. The ecosystem for a caring environment is deemed to be an integral part of developing a caring university.

Figure 2: The ecosystem for a caring environment is part of Wit’s value-based Mental Wellness Strategy

The Wits Mental Wellness strategy comprises four pillars as described in Figure 3, below;

Figure 3: The four pillars of Wits Mental and Wellness Strategy

The pillars address objectives such as increasing student awareness and understanding of mental health issues to strengthen student’s coping skills and to build resilience while simultaneously ensuring easy access to psychotherapeutic tools or services through walk-in systems and optimised referral systems. The third pillar focuses on increasing student engagement to create a sense of belonging. Importantly, the Mental and Wellness Strategy is undergirded by its alignment to the university’s vision and strategic priorities.

From the Wits presentation, it was clear that to address student wellness, the commitment of the university leadership to promoting a culture of support and belonging was deemed to be an institutional imperative.

Continuing the theme of the caring university, UWC presented their Integrated Student Mental Health and Wellness (ISMHW) policy. This policy has been informed by extensive research and based on the results of student data gathered from numerous surveys, consultations and interviews. As with the Wits strategy, the UWC policy also involved multi-stakeholder input, involving both internal and external partnerships. These features, coupled with leadership that models a “culture of care”, were identified by UWC as critical components for a viable mental health and wellness policy.

Figure 4: UWC’s Integrated Student Mental Health and Wellness policy

The ISMHWP policy, which was launched during the Mental Health awareness week in October, has guiding principles which incorporate the intersectionality of research, policy, and practice. This ensures that there are various avenues of examined and tested, tangible and intangible support for students’ mental health needs. Starting in 2022, UWC will be piloting, Making Your Mark though Mapworks (MYM) a flagship Student Mental Health and Wellness policy programme. MYM is an online instrument which uses predictive analytics as an enabler to assist students to take agency as partners in their own success. Students are provided with a map which supports them to take action in different life areas – both academic and personal and to assist them in managing stressors and to promote engagement in healthy academic and personal behaviours.

“You matter” and “It is ok not to be ok sometimes”, a compilation of short videos about mental health activities and self-help tips produced by the UWC community, was showcased during Mental Health Awareness week, attesting to the university’s commitment to skill students in being proactive in ensuring wellness.The recent inclusion of the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG) represented by Vanishaa Gordhan, has added great value to the workstream. She presented the sobering statistics on the state of mental health in South Africa that are referred to above (Fig. 1). She also highlighted the work of SADAG in the higher education sector below (Fig 5 ) and the plethora of freely available resources on the SADAG site.Figure 5: SADAG’s work in the Higher Education sector

Despite a range of interventions, which include running helplines in five universities, with over 40 Whatsapp peer support groups and SADAG’s collaboration with Higher Health which includes facilitating pro-bono psychotherapeutic sessions for students, the higher education sector continues to struggle to manage the negative impact of mental health challenges experienced by much of South Africa’s the youth.

After these insightful presentations, the workstream participants engaged in robust discussion around the need to problematise the notion of student success as equating only to academic success. In an interview on 98.7 FM in June this year, the Wits SRC president, Mpendulo Mfeka, addressed the fact that (even) well performing students are subjected to acute mental stresses. It is therefore, necessary to take a holistic view of the definition of ‘a successful student’. In a VUCA world (acronym referring to the phenomenon of turbulence in our current times i.e. Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity), the definition of student success needs to include the capacity for resilience and adaptability and not only academic performance.

1. important issues that emerged for the workstream to take forward, includethe need to develop a framework for student mental health and success in whichall interventions undertaken are data driven; collaboration between the various internal institutional services units and external stakeholders is promoted; and greater government investment in student mental health interventions is facilitated.

From marshalling hairdressers to assist in this silent pandemic, through demonstrations of solidarity for mental health sufferers by students sporting a semi-colon henna tattoo, to the provision of psychosocial skills courses for educators and others in community based organisations - all measures congruent with calls to integrate mental health support across the whole of society, it appears that a holistic approach is crucial to combatting the mental health pandemic in the educational sector. Indeed, as proposed by Schreiber and others (2021) a systemic-contextual model comprising four domains i.e. the personal, social-cultural, public, and the academic-faculty, which synergise, is vital to support student persistence and success.

The mental health workstream participant’s recent discussions reflect a keen awareness of the impact of these four domains on the mental health of students. It therefore appears that a focus on these aspects will be key in the future work of this workstream.