Consensus on Campus? Tension and Multiplicity in Student Mental Health
Date
2019-12
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Abstract
In Canada (as elsewhere), postsecondary student mental health is increasingly positioned as an urgent social problem, even a crisis. Scholarly, professional, and popular publications detail the escalating prevalence, complexity, and costliness of student mental health problems; myriad campus initiatives and services have arisen to enhance, maintain, or restore mental health. Despite the considerable power of psychiatric and psychotherapeutic discourses, heterogeneous meanings of mental health persist—often implicit in the logics of varying campus activities and messages. At sites where incommensurable logics intersect, tensions may arise that must be actively navigated or managed, whether by institutions or by students themselves. In this dissertation, I investigate tensions of postsecondary student mental health using situational analysis (SA), an interpretive qualitative method that seeks to make visible relations of difference, axes of discursive variation, and sites of silence in a multiply co-constituted material-discursive situation of interest. I apply SA to scholarly mental health literature, texts produced by campus stakeholders, and interviews with university students who self-identify as having experienced mental health problems, mapping heterogeneous constructions of mental health and lingering analytically in sites of potential tension. Students’ meaning-making around mental health is rich, diverse, complex, and situated, and may not fit easily into prevailing institutional logics of efficiency, rationalization, and risk management. My aim with this study was to generatively complicate the student mental health conversation, working against premature discursive closure. I offer an unconventional account of student mental health, one in which meanings remain unsettled, contested, and political. Such analysis is difficult to distil into best practices, but supports a posture of flexible, pluralistic, and situated responding to the remarkably diverse concerns that have come to be classified as “mental health problems.”
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student mental health, college, post-secondary, university, campus, situational analysis, discursive research, wellness culture, therapeutic culture, pluralism
Citation
Ross, K. H. (2019). Consensus on Campus? Tension and Multiplicity in Student Mental Health (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.