Image: Sue Wick, a retired University of Minnesota professor is part of the Allyship and Early Detection group for PRISMH, which is the President’s Initiative on Student Mental Health. On April 6, 2022, in St. Paul Minnesota, she worked from home and had a meeting about a potential joint proposal to help faculty and educational departments alleviate stress around classroom work. (Shannon Brault)
Through her service on mental health task forces and councils, Wick has had a clear message for faculty: Don’t contribute to the problem by increasing stress on students.
By Anna Koenning
Sue Wick retired in 2019 as a professor of plant and microbial biology. But that hasn’t stopped her from advocating for student mental health at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.
“I’m supposedly retired, but not so much,” she said with a laugh. “There are important things going on and I can’t pull myself away from them.”
One of these important things, she said, is her role as a subject matter expert in the President’s Initiative for Student Mental Health (PRISMH), a campus initiative to shift the University’s focus from mental health treatment to prevention.
The initiative’s task force seeks to systemically transform the way the University thinks about mental health, and wants to shift the focus to preventing mental illness in students instead of treating it after there is a problem.
The number of students at the University who report they have been diagnosed with a mental illness in their lifetime has nearly doubled since 2010. According to Boynton’s 2021 student health survey, the percentage has grown to 51.7% of students compared to 27.1% in 2010.
Wick remembers the first time she really started thinking about student mental health, which was when she heard a report at a University Senate Faculty Consultative Committee about student counseling and clinical services, including the number of students served and appointment wait times.
She worried the focus on increasing clinical care wasn’t enough and thought the University should explore a more comprehensive assessment of student stress, as well as figuring out what might push students toward needing these services.
“It struck me that besides looking at the services delivery angle of student mental health, we also needed a task force to look at the role that instructors play in either adding to or ameliorating academic stress for students, and to come up with recommendations for addressing unnecessary course-related stress,” she said.
Before it disbanded, Wick was a part of the Provost’s Council on Student Mental Health. Later, she joined PRISMH’s allyship and early detection working group. The working group exists to “assess opportunities for training faculty, staff and students and make these opportunities more accessible systemwide,” according to the PRISMH website.
One of her biggest priorities, she said, is to find strategies for faculty and staff to reduce students’ stress. To care for her own wellbeing, Wick said she snowshoes, cross-country skis, gardens, bikes and kayaks.
“I really believe that faculty and other instructors have the responsibility,” she said. “Someone in counseling might see a person only when they’re in crisis, or even if they’re not in crisis, might only see them once a month. Whereas we’re seeing students on a daily basis, so we should be aware of where students are coming from and what we can do to not make things worse.”
Wick believes that one problem with University teaching is that instructors prioritize their field and expertise rather than the social components of teaching.
“We’re so focused on the discipline that we teach… and that’s such a small part of what education and learning are about,” she said. “If you’re in class and you’re uncomfortable, either physically or mentally, if you’re anxious, if you’re angry, all of that affects whether or not you can actually learn something.”
Former Boynton chief medical officer Gary Christensen served as co-chair with Wick on a task force that produced a report in 2017 recommending strategies faculty could take to improve the learning environment for student mental health. He said Wick was critical to ensuring that the task force’s report came from an academic standpoint centered on instructors.
“I really was pleased with the kind of approach we took, again with Sue being the co-chair it was guaranteed that there was going to be a different kind of approach than the traditional kind of ‘let’s look at clinical services,’” he said.
During her time on the Provost’s Council on Student Mental Health in 2019, Wick helped create a systemwide student survey on course-related stress, and reported on the survey’s findings with recommendations.
The survey found that students suffer when there is unclear communication from instructors, excessive or non-relevant coursework and “problematic instructional strategies” including late or insufficient feedback and poorly managed group work.
Student responses said that they appreciated professors who demonstrated flexibility in deadlines and exams, a tactic that Wick believes more professors should employ to reduce student stress.
“If I have a chronic disease and I have a horrible migraine that morning then I’m not going in to take a test that day,” she said. “It’s the inflexibility and the rigidity of some professors and some programs that do not recognize that life happens.”
She recognized that for classes in some fields, such as nursing, tests cannot be made flexible. This might happen in clinical settings when an actor comes in with a specific ailment, a situation that can’t be recreated for students who missed that day. Still, Wick says that there should be accommodations.
“There have to be ways to accommodate for times when something interferes or when life comes up,” she said. “I think programs have to decide what’s absolutely essential for this major or this program.”
As she coded the perceived stressors from students, one response that Wick found interesting was the impact of warmth or hostility in a syllabus.
“Does the syllabus talk about all the terrible things that will happen to you if you don’t do this, this and this by these deadlines?” Wick said.
An inviting syllabus, on the other hand, benefits students.
“In my experience, as well as in the literature, being mentioned and specifically welcomed is especially appreciated by first-generation students and others who might feel marginalized or unsure of their ability to do well in the course, such as those with mental health concerns,” she said.
Wick said that professors should be empathetic with students, and she thinks that the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic opened many instructors’ eyes to the challenges their pupils face.
The pandemic also gave them tools to help all students, like lecture recordings that instructors can post so that anybody in the class can review the lesson.
Wick ultimately hopes PRISMH can bring about the widespread changes to thinking about mental health on campus that she’s been studying for years.
“I’m hoping to see that the whole U of M system will realize how complicated mental health is and that it’s everybody’s responsibility,” she said. “We need to be aware of where students are so that we can help them.”