Brewster, L. and Cox, A.M. orcid.org/0000-0002-2587-245X (2023) Taking a ‘whole-university’ approach to student mental health : the contribution of academic libraries. Higher Education Research & Development, 42 (1). pp. 33-47. ISSN 0729-4360
Abstract
As concerns about student mental health have increased, policy aims have moved towards a ‘whole-university’ approach. The 2017 Universities UK #Stepchange framework made this principle a formal part of policy initiatives and legitimises it via its calls for action. The policy distributes responsibility for mental health support across the institution, highlighting four key reasons for intervention: risk, regulation, success and policy. However, little is known about how this policy has been translated into practice and how activities for mental health have been adopted into the everyday work of higher education (HE) institutions. This article explores how one service common across all HE institutions, the academic library, has interpreted this call to contribute to student mental health. Using data from a national UK survey alongside policy analysis, this article investigates the strategic rationale and the practicalities of engaging with a whole-university approach. Findings show that local concerns often drove activity, which could be mapped to some aspects of a whole-university approach, but that the boundaries of professional expertise and resources were key considerations in accepting distributed responsibility. More broadly, mental health support was recontextualised to include wellbeing; this made it easier to adopt some aspects of a whole-university approach but focused on prevention rather than risk and regulation. As a result, activities being conducted in practice did not align directly with the whole-university approach.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. |
Keywords: | Student mental health; whole-university approach; academic libraries |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) > Information School (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 09 Mar 2022 11:36 |
Last Modified: | 23 Feb 2023 11:36 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/07294360.2022.2043249 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:184540 |