Mental Health and Wellbeing: HE Minds Matter

Mental Health and Wellbeing – Webinar 

This webinar is closed 

We’re back with another exciting webinar! To support World Mental Health Day this October, we are partnering up with Advance HE to host an exclusive webinar on ‘Mental Health and Wellbeing: HE Minds Matter’.

In our Higher Education institutions, staff referrals to counselling and occupational health have soared in recent years, and the stresses of the pandemic impacted on academic and professional services staff as much as on students. While there has been a focus on student mental health and wellbeing –  what causes it, what helps – and innovations such as the Student Minds University Mental Health Charter, there has been less attention on what’s happening among staff. Are we experiencing a mental health crisis, what are the challenges we face, and what can we do to address them?

Join us to explore this complex topic with our panel, who will discuss questions from whether there is a mental health epidemic among academics and what’s causing it, to what we can do as institutions and individuals to support our wellbeing.

Session topics:

• What are the biggest challenges to staff wellbeing in the HE sector? And what works to support staff mental health?
• Exploring the specific mental health experiences and needs of academic, professional services and early career staff, as well as minoritised and disadvantaged staff
• Strategies for managing and supporting your own wellbeing and that of others
• Navigating support systems and building your own support network
• Your questions answered in a live Q & A session

Register Now >>

Panellists:

Helen Webster, Senior Consultant, Student Success

Helen has worked in Higher Education since 2000, with a background in Student Services and Learning Development. A PGCE-qualified teacher in Post-Compulsory Education, Helen was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in 2019 in recognition of her work developing person-centred, holistic and interprofessional approaches to supporting student learning. She is interested in whole-university, inclusive approaches to supporting student transition and pedagogies for embedding academic skills and confidence and wellbeing in the curriculum. As AdvanceHE’s Senior Adviser for Student Success, she works across a range of areas including access, retention, attainment and progression and has also supported Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher development.

Kalimah Ibrahiim, Lecturer, Occupational Therapist, University of East London

Kalimah is an Occupational Therapist and Lecturer at the University of East London. In clinical practice, she has worked in various clinical areas within the NHS, Social Care and prisons. Kalimah is a doctorate student in Public Health keen with interests in health justice, policy and curriculum redesign. Her current work focuses on cross-cultural differences in mental health literacy.

Liz Morrish, Visiting Fellow

Liz Morrish was Principal Lecturer and Subject Leader of Linguistics at Nottingham Trent University. A recent book (co-authored with Helen Sauntson) was published by Routledge in 2019: Academic Irregularities: Language and Neoliberalism in Higher Education. Liz also writes a blog: Academic Irregularities. Liz has also written a report for the Higher Education Policy Institute on the mental health crisis for academics in UK universities: Pressure Vessels: The epidemic of poor mental health among higher education staff (Occasional Paper 20, May 2019). Liz is now an independent scholar in critical university studies and is also a visiting fellow at York St John University.

Petra Boynton, Research Consultant

Petra is a Social Psychologist, specialising in supporting charities, universities and other organisations to make research more accessible, ethica, safe and effective. Her current focus is on improving proactive and whole-campus approaches, pastoral care and supervision; to prevent and respond to staff and student needs. Petra applies her research through advice-giving, including the most recent book “Being Well In Academia: ways to feel stronger, safer and more connected’ (Routledge, 2020).

Allan Laville, Dean for Diversity and Inclusion & Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology, University of Reading

Allán is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society (BPS). He is a member of the Scientific Programme Advisory Group for the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies.

In 2019, Allán won the Reading University Student Union Award for Diverse and Inclusive Teaching Excellence and in 2020, he was awarded a University Teaching Fellowship. Allán was runner-up in the British Psychology Society and Oxford University Press Higher Education Psychology Teacher of the Year 2020 competition

Discover other articles on mental health and wellbeing from jobs.ac.uk: 

• Mental Health jobs profile
• Mental Health Awareness for Managers
• Positive Mental Health in Higher Education

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