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Photo by The Jopwell Collection on Unsplash

Prioritising and protecting mental health

This year, the theme of World Mental Health Day – ‘It is Time to Prioritize Mental Health in the Workplace – brings our focus to the importance of prioritising, protecting and promoting good mental health in professional environments.

Where a student studies is, in many ways, their workplace and arguably it is here that good mental health practices should be set to lay the foundations for future employment – as well as supporting good mental health during their studies.

However, students cannot learn to nurture good mental health practices on their own. Indeed, learning about how they work best and what support they might need takes time. Universities and colleges should be spaces that allow students to do just that.

Filling the gaps

Last year at TASO, we developed the Student Mental Health toolkit in collaboration with SMaRtEN at King’s College London, AMOSSHE, the Student Services Organisation, What Works Wellbeing and Student Minds. Our toolkit put together the most current evidence on a broad variety of interventions aimed at improving student mental health and wellbeing. The evidence base on student mental health interventions in the UK, however, is in its infancy. We found that, though there is strong evidence for psychological interventions, many types of interventions, such as placed based ones, recreational, or curriculum based interventions are lacking in evidence.

These might be the very ones that nurture a student as they work at their degree. For example, place based interventions make changes to the environments in which students study, live and socialise in order to boost mental health. Our evidence review found that there was a real lack of evidence in the area though there is some supporting evidence in the wider literature in support of natural environments in improving mental health at work, in public spaces and health environments.

You can find out more about the gaps in the evidence from our evidence review and the findings from our qualitative investigation of the delivery and evaluation of student mental health interventions on our website.

2024-25 projects

This year, TASO’s projects are addressing the gaps in the evidence from our previous findings during the Student Mental Health Project. We are evaluating interventions that support student mental health and wellbeing by considering the student holistically. We are addressing support from a number of angles: from an academic perspective, from a skills development perspective, from a pastoral perspective and a recreational perspective.

This year, our projects will be tackling mental health and wellbeing using different methodologies. In one project, we are running a randomised controlled trial evaluating how analytics might be used to prompt wellbeing interventions. Using quasi-experimental designs, we are also evaluating the role of wellbeing modules and pastoral mentors in supporting wellbeing. And to support those working with small cohorts, we are also evaluating a coaching and a recreational intervention using theory-based evaluation methods. We will be publishing more on our individual projects in the coming months so watch this space.

With these projects, we will be able to add to the evidence base on interventions that improve student mental health and wellbeing so that higher education providers can support students to learn, develop and thrive in their studies and beyond.