S4 E35: Faculty Mental Health Matters

Faculty mental health is rarely discussed—but deeply connected to teaching, learning, and student success. In this Hear From Your Host episode, guest host and Producer Kelly Chandler turns the microphone toward our host, Dr. Rachel Yoho, to explore faculty mental health as a critical, and often overlooked, aspect of higher education. Drawing on research and observations, the conversation examines structural stressors in academia, the isolating nature of teaching, and the importance of community and support. Faculty will gain language, context, and practical ways to think about wellbeing - not as individual self‑care alone, but as a shared, systemic commitment essential to effective teaching and sustainable academic pursuits.

Guest Note: This is an academic exploration of a topic, not medical or mental health advice. Many campuses, local communities, and health insurances have mental health support. 

Resources: Some Mason Resources: Employee Assistance Programs: https://hr.gmu.edu/benefits/insurance-and-benefits/employee-assistance-programs/  Mason Korea: BetterHelp online counseling sessions available. TimelyCare: mental health line https://rsr.gmu.edu/timelycare-now-available-to-faculty-and-staff/?utm_source=provosts&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=facstaff&utm_term=20260126  Leave: https://hr.gmu.edu/benefits/leave/ Dual Career Assistance: https://hr.gmu.edu/support-resources/spouse-and-partner-employment/ Employee Resource Groups, Communities of Practice, and Other Networks: https://hr.gmu.edu/support-resources/faculty-and-staff-networks/ Disability and Religious Accommodations: https://hr.gmu.edu/support-resources/disability-and-religious-accommodations/ Center for the Advancement of Well-being's Faculty and Staff Resources: https://wellbeing.gmu.edu/resources-2/resources/ For references to the discussion and sources cited, please visit https://stearnscenter.gmu.edu/knowledge-center/keystone-concepts-in-teaching-podcast/season-4-spring-2026-keystone-concepts-in-teaching/

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Transcript

Kelly 0:08

Hello and welcome to the Keystone Concepts in Teaching podcast. My name is Kelly Chandler and I am the producer for the podcast where we share impactful and evidence-based teaching practices to support all students and faculty. For this episode, I am also your guest host in our now third episode in our Hear From Your Host series. For these special episodes, we turn the tables and listeners get to hear from our host, Dr. Rachel Yoho, about keystone concepts in teaching. Dr. Yoho is our Assistant Director in the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning. She's also a faculty affiliate in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy, and faculty affiliate in Bioengineering in the College of Engineering and Computing, and a research affiliate with the Center for the Advancement of Wellbeing. So in today's episode, we'll be talking about what I would consider a less discussed topic in higher ed faculty mental health. So would you agree? Less discussed, right?

Rachel 1:08

Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you so much, Kelly. Thanks for that introduction and thanks for being a guest host.

Kelly 1:13

Oh yeah. I love doing these special episodes. So, to get us started, let's just talk about first initially, how do you approach conversations about faculty mental health?

Rachel 1:24

Yeah, it's a hard conversation, right? It's something that's not widely discussed like we were just mentioning, but also really looking at this from the perspective of how to have a workshop on faculty mental health. So coming at this from the perspective of having an academic and professional development type of workshop that's not medical advice, not mental health advice. You know, really looking at what are the academic things that we can investigate, that we can explore, and really thinking about what the situations and context are, particularly in post-secondary or higher education.

Kelly 2:02

Right. So not only with teaching, but also how might, or how does, mental health impact other faculty work, such as advising, mentoring, research, right? All those other areas that faculty have to wear the mini hats in.

Rachel 2:16

Absolutely. And there really are so many hats. If we take a step back for a moment, mental health is considered a basic human right. You know, according to the World Health Organization, it's a basic human right for all people. So everyone, whoever, and wherever they are, has that deserving and inherent right to the highest attainable standard of mental health. And so if we take that into the higher education context, we wanna be thinking about what does this look like for instructors of all different appointment types? And so academia really has a mental health crisis. And so what we know and what's well studied, well discussed is student mental health. So there have been well-documented, increasing student mental health issues like anxiety, depression, self-harm ideation. We also see the lingering and perhaps worsening impacts from the pandemic, the education during that time, social interactions changing. Even things like we might be thinking about interactions with AI and how that impacts education as well, which we've had certainly other conversations on the podcast about. And, but really overall, we're thinking about the significant quantity of studies and a substantial literature base on student mental health. But what's less studied or less discussed as well is faculty mental health. And so, like you were talking about, Kelly, you know, there's so many different hats, so many different things we do, and I think we'll explore that through our whole conversation today. But if we think about the general mission of universities, we're serving and we're educating students. As we do that less attention and less effort is given to faculty and staff wellbeing. And so when we think about the typical, perhaps, workplace wellbeing initiatives, those are generally from human resources. But one of the challenges, one of the obstacles there is that faculty generally don't, perhaps, self-identify as employees. It's a little bit of a unique space, you know, as an academic, but we also have other challenges. We have a stigma, some lack of awareness, limited research focus, privacy concerns, lots of things that are impacting or negatively impacting the study. And so coming back to the question there, we're really thinking about the different types of interactions that we have with other people and how those are impacted by our mental health. So that might be the research, advising that could be academic mentorship that could be teaching, or even our interactions with colleagues or other offices. And so obviously as we think about this, just from a general perspective, there are lots and lots of different ways that our mental health as individuals impacts how we interact with others, how we interact in different spaces.

Kelly 5:09

I love that you bring up that mental health is a basic human right. I've never heard it put that way, and I especially like the context that you add around this conversation with burnout from post COVID and now AI in our workplace, right? And the kind of barriers, like you mentioned for talking and approaching this very sensitive topic such as the stigma and privacy concerns. So I think that context is really important when talking about this. With all of that context, what are some other things that we might be needing to think about for this topic?

Rachel 5:44

Yeah, I think here it really takes us to, you know, some of the drivers of faculty mental health concerns. You know, some of the things that are either contributing or perhaps causing some of the concerns. And so when we think about academia, there's generally a very competitive culture. We can talk about and we can think about the many competing interests, like we were just talking about, the different hats, you know, in teaching, research, service, advising, mentoring, whatever these might look like. But there's also just that general type of scarcity culture that we're expected to do more with less. And so there are also many unique challenges in these types of roles. And again, different appointment types even have different types of challenges. Right? But we also are doing things like managing classrooms that could be physical spaces, that could be fully online spaces. And we're also adapting to those changing educational contexts, just like you were mentioning like AI, but also even things like changing the learning management system. You know, anything where we need to fundamentally change where we are or how we're doing business is really important. These are time and labor intensive activities. And so as we're thinking about this, when we come back to the importance of the conversation, obviously the importance is inherent, but also faculty mental health is really essential to being able to support students as well. We can't support students effectively and with impact, if we are forgetting our faculty, if we are not supporting our faculty in their varying needs across appointment types and across career stages and all of those things. And so we have many growing stressors that we want to acknowledge. Maybe not all of these are relevant to every single person or every single institution, but in general, we might be thinking about the workload, a lack of autonomy, maybe insufficient resources, or support. We might have many different conflicting work or personal responsibilities or imbalances there. And so as we do this, a lot of things are contributing to potential problems, potential issues.

Kelly 7:55

You know when you mentioned different appointment types and the different stressors that they might come into contact with, I couldn't help but think of my experience as an adjunct.

Rachel 8:03

Mm hmm, yeah.

Kelly 8:05

Especially talking about lack of resources and maybe lack of support. Also isolation can become kind of inherent to being an adjunct. And I also love what you mentioned about having to constantly learn new programs. I mean, just switched to a, I know, right?

Rachel 8:23

Yeah, right.

Kelly 8:24

We just switched to our new learning management system. But it's not just that, especially on the staff side too, all the new financial programs and things that are constantly changing. But I will say when I very first got into an education role, one of the things that my mentor told me was, if you're going into education, you need to get used to change. I hope you, I hope you don't have any problems with change. Yeah.

Rachel 8:46

Insightful.

Kelly 8:47

Yes, I'm glad she told me that. But like you mentioned, you know, you need to put your mask on first, right, like when you're on the airline safety brief, in order to meet the needs of your students and support your students. So what are some of the, what I would call, workplace essentials for faculty wellbeing? Some of these tools that we need in our toolbox.

Rachel 9:06

Yeah, I think that's a great question. And so when we're thinking about this, and I do wanna emphasize also what you mentioned, Kelly, about teaching being isolating. I mean, certainly for our adjunct contingent part-time faculty, but also for everyone. I mean, you are the only person in the room, in most cases, as the educator, maybe you're lucky enough to have a TA teaching assistant or grader or something like that. But in most cases it's very isolating and that's why community building is so important. When we're thinking about teaching and professional development. And so as we think about basically the system from the inside out, we wanna be thinking about the essentials to workplace mental health and wellbeing. So a 2022 publication from Health and Human Services, we're really looking at five essentials. We have protection from harm, connection and community, work-life harmony, mattering at work, and opportunity for growth. And so obviously there are things that go into that and many different aspects there. But we want to be thinking about what those things are and how that looks for, again, different appointment types, different institutions perhaps, because as we do this, we know there are a number of obstacles also too that those support seeking behaviors. So it might be stress about disclosing or lack of awareness of different support structures or fear of stigma or discrimination, impressions of like weakness or inadequacy or even potential negative career impacts. So as we think about these, we really want to be addressing some of the causes. And some of those are structural, right? Some of those are not things that we can just, you know, yoga our way out of our stress, right? So as we do that, we really want to be thinking about some of those structural needs.

Kelly 11:00

I love the yoga comment. As a, as a yogi myself, it can only go so far.

Rachel 11:07

That is not going to stretch you out of structural problems.

Kelly 11:11

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And just as a plug to some of our previous episodes, we do talk about some really good community building tools in episode 31 recently and 28. So go check those out if you haven't already, listeners. But back to these structural needs, can you talk us through, what are some of the ideas you might have about what this could look like?

Rachel 11:33

Well, as we think about this, some of the challenges that we might have, I mean, academia and education is fairly unique as a profession, that you can be dropped into a classroom with little to no teaching preparation and be told to teach. And that's a challenge that ends up with often a lot of situations where you try to replicate what you've seen before.

Kelly 11:56

Exactly.

Rachel 11:57

And activities or styles or approaches are replicated from generation to generation of academics. So a lack of preparation for the thing that you're supposed to be doing is certainly, uh a stressor, but also teaching. Teaching is hard. Teaching is time consuming. Grading is time consuming. It takes away from some of those other hats that we were talking about, but again, we might be thinking about those class sizes or workload or maybe we're having a lot of under-prepared or struggling students. Those are challenges. How do we address those? But again, it kind of comes back to that, how do I teach effectively to all of my students? How do I support students? And that's even leaving aside many of the issues around, for instance, student evaluations of teaching and structural things there.

Kelly 12:44

Oh, yikes. Yeah, we could do a whole episode on that.

Rachel 12:47

That would be a whole episode or more. Um, absolutely. And so when we think about the problem largely being structural, it seems like one of those, okay, I'll just throw my hands up and go, there's nothing I can do about this. But that's not necessarily the case in all spaces, right? And so as we do this, we wanna be thinking about the types of conversations that we have. So even having these conversations, engaging in workshops, you know, this is an opportunity to engage with colleagues if there's, for instance, a workshop or a conversation on faculty mental health, that we might never get to have in general with our colleagues. And so it can really help to reduce some of that stigma, create a more inclusive environment, share resources, those types of things. Obviously this, it's not like group therapy or something like that, but really having those conversations, you know, is really one way to build awareness. It's to talk about the stressors, it's to talk about how do we work to address some of those within our program, within our department, our college, our institution as a whole. Whatever the level is that we are working at. Wherever we can be positive change makers. We also wanna be thinking about the resources that are available. So as we do this, you can't connect with resources if you don't know that they're there. Same with when we talk about supporting our students. If we don't know that there are resources available, we can't connect our students with them either. So as we do that, we might want to be looking at what are the resources, not only for ourselves, but for our colleagues as well. How do we connect with those types of resources or counseling services or things that are available to us as employees of our institution? And so obviously many of these activities can be very structural or access to those, but some of our individual things, we might be thinking about some of our own mindfulness practices or how we as an individual manage our own stress. Or our work-life balance, work-life integration, whatever your preferred term is there. But we might also be thinking about how we invest in ourselves. So our own professional development can be really useful, not only in terms of these specific topics, but even in terms of our teaching. How do we teach with more impact? How can we teach effectively, efficiently? How do we grade efficiently? All of those types of things that we can gain from, and many others, that we can gain from professional development opportunities, can help, can help in our efficiency, our approaches, our confidence, any of those types of things. And so the other thing that we've really emphasized, and you were just mentioning as well, Kelly, in some of our other episodes, is thinking about our community. Because, like we were talking about earlier, teaching is incredibly isolating. So having a sense of community working to build connections, build community, one of those ways that we've talked about many times is through a teaching and learning center, or perhaps some things in our professional societies. Any community building that can be a resource. So as we do this, you know, leaning on each other for advice or empathy or support, anything that makes teaching slightly less isolating. Any place that we can share ideas or resources or even just a supportive conversation if we need it. So as we do that, we wanna be thinking about what are some of the resources at our own institution. We'll certainly link to some of those for George Mason University specifically in our show notes. But we wanna be thinking about, again, how do we make these conversations more visible, and how can we be a positive change maker in whatever our space is. Like I said, it could be a program or even a coordinated course or a department or within our college. So really thinking about how do we create those structures for support? How do we create those community spaces and all the different types of things that can work at some of these challenges from many different angles.

Kelly 16:52

Yes. I love the point, once again, about community, community, community. Sometimes it's really helpful to just commiserate with someone. And just

Rachel 17:03

Someone gets it!

Kelly 17:04

Yes, yes. That validation of, Oh, okay, this isn't just happening in my classroom. I'm not the only one who feels like this. I'm not the only one who's struggling with this post COVID situation or AI in the classroom. So just getting into community with your fellow faculty members. And I also want to mention on the staff side, I think we've, I'm not sure if it exists on the faculty side to be honest, but I think we've tried to do a pretty good job of creating Teams spaces where, you know, people who work mostly remote, maybe they're not on campus and they can't do like the water cooler hangout, right? They can't just wait around in the lunch room to see if they get to chit chat with someone. We've got these chat spaces. And so when that huge winter storm came in the other week, people were like, Oh, post your favorite picture of your dog playing in the snow or something, right? Like, just even those kind of small bits of connection can help feel less isolated in this huge university space. And I also like what you mentioned about barriers in relation to kind of the competitive culture. And I didn't know if you wanted to expand on what you mean by that. I was in the faculty space for a short amount of time, and I was an adjunct, so I don't know if I quite got a taste of that as much as someone in a different appointment status.

Rachel 18:29

Yeah, so I mean, I think that's a great point, and it does certainly vary across appointment types. The race to publish can be between institutions, it could be between research groups at different institutions. You know, that publish or perish type of environment is certainly more common in some fields than others. Certainly the STEM fields are very, very competitive in that type of space. But we might also be thinking about the competitive culture in terms of even things like reappointment or promotions, tenure, you know, those types of things. And so that often might not, certainly not always, but might lead into cases of workplace bullying. You know, it's very detrimental, particularly to new hires or non-tenured faculty. And so it's bad for individuals. It's bad for the institution, right? And so there's that sort of star researcher bully type of sketch, if you will, particularly common in like the STEM fields. And so

Kelly 19:28

Oh, wow. Yikes.

Rachel 19:30

But some that might be a career strategy, you know, a way for more mediocre individuals to rise in their fields, right. Keeping others down. So we wanna be thinking about strategies for being an ally, you know, how those are reported, watching for retaliatory behaviors, awareness, you know, are there gatekeeping things being thrown up? You know, whatever, whatever advocacy we can do from whatever position or area or amount of seniority or role that we have. But just briefly also, academia is a little bit interesting in a, in a lot of ways, right? But one of the other things that might occur is academic contrapower harassment. So basically that's where someone who is seemingly and less power harasses someone with more power in an educational setting. So that might be, in particular, students harassing their faculty member, something like that. And so there are observed disparities between like what women report, what men report, how those show up. Like for instance, with women, students are more likely to challenge their authority or argue against course policies or be more disruptive or disrespectful. So as we do this, you know, there are many different things that we wanna be thinking about and challenges, but it really comes back here to those structural needs. You know, we need an organizational plan. We need institutional support, institutional at many levels, program, department, college, you know, whole institution, and leadership support, but also our individual actions. How do we support ourselves? How do we support our colleagues? So I think that really leads into our keystone concept for today is support, whatever that support looks like for ourselves. How do we support our colleagues? How do we become, how do we be that positive change that we want to see at many different levels, at many different spaces within our own organization? So I think here that's really what we want to focus on. Not just that there are so many challenges, right? There are so many things that we probably haven't discussed. This is certainly not a comprehensive list of all the things, but we wanna be thinking about where do we make positive impacts? Where do we need support? Where do we seek support? And where are those spaces for our own support as well?

Kelly 21:52

Thank you. I love your points about being an advocate, being an ally for your fellow faculty member. That's excellent. So thank you for your insights on faculty mental health.

Rachel 22:04

Absolutely. Maybe a little insight, maybe a little bit of just discussing problems, but thank you and thank you for guest hosting, Kelly.

Kelly 22:11

Yes, of course. These are always super fun for me and I really appreciate the resources that you listed that are at Mason, but also could be at many institutions across anywhere. Yeah and thank you listeners for joining Dr. Yoho and I in our now third Hear From Your Host episode. And as always, be sure to join us for our next episode in two weeks and follow us on your favorite podcast platform.