Who cares for academics? We need to talk about emotional well-being including what we avoid and intellectualise through macro-discourses

Abstract

This article explores academics’ well-being through analysing published sensitive disclosures, bringing to journal space the pain, rawness and emotional suffering of individuals’ experiences. We confront the taboos of speaking openly about mental health and emotional well-being in academic institutions, with masculine structures and encroaching neoliberal discourses that create hostile atmospheres unsupportive of vulnerability and uncertainty. We also challenge existing discourses about academics’ well-being, implicitly burdening individuals as responsible for their pain and creating walls of shame, rather than building new healthy structures. By spotlighting the voices of academics’ emotional disclosures, intensified by embodied social inequalities, we plead for openness in formal academic outlets for sharing pre-existing emotional struggles and new wounds created by cruelly competitive, winner-takes-all structures, fortified by neoliberal ideals. Led by individuals’ voices and experiences, we make recommendations for supporting academics as an attempt to extract academia from its current perverse state and commit to repair and transformation.

What influences students in their development of socio-emotional intelligence whilst at university?

“…Within the context of HE in the UK this is something which has not been fully embraced and therefore presents many interesting possibilities. For instance, there should be a focus on development and enhancement of the lecturer's own SEI to enhance the lecturer's own wellbeing during their academic career; an area identified as an issue, especially in the past few years, but neglected even though it is very important (Smith & Ulus, 2019).…”

Shedding Light on Restorative Spaces and Faculty Well-Being

“…Recent work has pointed to increased workload as problematic for mental health and well-being (Baker, Pifer, & Lunsford, 2016;Flaherty, 2018;Krause, 2018;Shaw, 2014;Smith & Ulus, 2019). Shaw (2014: para.…”

“…We hope that by sharing these experiences, we demonstrate that restorative spaces are not one size fits all, and that there need not be shame in making use of them in academic life. Moreover, we seek to "organize solidarity," that is, to build community not just around disclosure of poor mental health and wellbeing (Smith & Ulus, 2019), but also around recovery and restoration.…”

Mechanisms of micro-terror? Early career CMS academics’ experiences of ‘targets and terror’ in contemporary business schools

“…A subsequent Higher Education Policy Institute report points to 'an epidemic of poor mental health' in UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), identifying sharp increases in referrals to counselling (77%) and occupational health (64%) between 2009 and 2015 (Morrish, 2019). Universities are now 'anxiety machines' (Hall and Bowles, 2016) and academic well-being is a growing theme in Higher Education (HE) research (O'Brien and Guiney, 2018;Smith and Ulus, 2019). HE research identifies changes in university cultures as the cause underlying the spread of well-being and mental health issues among faculty (Ruth et al, 2018).…”

“…In doing so, we identify the processes by which the quest for achievement targets may transform into mechanisms of everyday 'terror' (Di Leo, 2015;Giroux, 2004) and 'violence of academia' (Smith and Ulus, 2019). We refer to such daily, mundane terror as 'micro-terror' -a kind of dark negative of 'micro-emancipation' (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002) -both to highlight its pervasive and often subtle nature and to distinguish it from more dramatic major manifestations of terror.…”