Consensus on Campus? Tension and Multiplicity in Student Mental Health

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dc.contributor.advisorStrong, Tom
dc.contributor.authorRoss, Karen H.
dc.contributor.committeememberBurwell, Catherine
dc.contributor.committeememberWada, Kaori
dc.contributor.committeememberBarker, Susan
dc.contributor.committeememberMorrow, Marina
dc.date2020-02
dc.date.accessioned2019-12-11T17:38:50Z
dc.date.available2019-12-11T17:38:50Z
dc.date.issued2019-12
dc.description.abstractIn 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.”en_US
dc.identifier.citationRoss, 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.en_US
dc.identifier.doihttp://dx.doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/37329
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1880/111333
dc.language.isoengen_US
dc.publisher.facultyWerklund School of Educationen_US
dc.publisher.institutionUniversity of Calgaryen
dc.rightsUniversity of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.en_US
dc.subjectstudent mental healthen_US
dc.subjectcollegeen_US
dc.subjectpost-secondaryen_US
dc.subjectuniversityen_US
dc.subjectcampusen_US
dc.subjectsituational analysisen_US
dc.subjectdiscursive researchen_US
dc.subjectwellness cultureen_US
dc.subjecttherapeutic cultureen_US
dc.subjectpluralismen_US
dc.subject.classificationEducational Psychologyen_US
dc.subject.classificationEducation--Guidance and Counselingen_US
dc.subject.classificationMental Healthen_US
dc.titleConsensus on Campus? Tension and Multiplicity in Student Mental Healthen_US
dc.typedoctoral thesisen_US
thesis.degree.disciplineEducation Graduate Program – Educational Psychologyen_US
thesis.degree.grantorUniversity of Calgaryen_US
thesis.degree.nameDoctor of Philosophy (PhD)en_US
ucalgary.item.requestcopytrueen_US
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