Crisis Services Canada

The Trevor Project

Trans Lifeline

Wellness Together Canada

B.C.-Based Services

CRISIS CENTRE B.C.

Foundry

HERE2HELP B.C.

HERE2TALK B.C.

UBC-Based Services for Students

Therapy Assistance Online (TAO)

UBC Counselling Services

UBC Student Assistance Program (SAP)

UBC Wellness Centre

UBC-Based Services for Staff and Faculty

Faculty and Staff Mental Health Resources

Group Composition

Participant Safety

Workshop Duration

Scene Sequence

Facilitator Role

• Examines PhD student satisfaction across 63 universities in 20 countries.
• Finds that supervisor supportiveness, along with academic qualities and supportiveness of departments, has greatest impact on PhD student satisfaction.
• Explores how increased satisfaction would contribute to PhD student wellbeing and performance.

• Reviews current literature on PhD candidates’ mental health, with four primary outcomes: 1) Issues affecting PhD candidate mental health are multifaceted and interrelated, 2) need better alignment between interventions and stressors identified in literature, 3) need better designed, standardized instruments to validate stressors and evaluate interventions, 4) need updated typologies that include the full range of stressors.
• Discusses connection between PhD candidate mental health and supervisor relationships and whole research ecosystem.
• Examines interventions for mental health among PhD candidates, finding: 1) they are not well aligned to contributing factors, 2) they are focused on treating symptoms rather than underlying causes of mental health issues.

• Found: a decline in graduate student wellbeing from 2009 to 2014; lower degree of satisfaction for women; wellbeing declines with advancing stages of doctorate.
• Threats to wellbeing include developmental and career uncertainty, along with changing contexts and communities.
• Top 10 impacts on wellbeing similar between earlier and later study, but the impact was greater in 2014. (Supervisory issues fall in the middle of the top 10.)
• Four primary recommendations: Enhance integrated support for doctoral students, in particular female students; improve support for later stage doctoral researchers; develop training and understanding of wellbeing for all staff who engage with doctoral students; improve signposting of support to all (staff and students).

No Other Choice

• Focus on common areas of conflict in supervisory relationships with international graduate students.
• Argues need for conflict management and prevention in these relationships (involving a third person who is nonjudgmental, will offer solutions and has conflict management training).
• Outlines common sources of conflict: differing expectations about responsibilities and relationship; lack of useful feedback; differing values about important skills; lack of respect, openness, time, support/guidance and communication.

• Highlights recurring challenges, discusses impact of culture on the relationship and provides concrete suggestions for building positive relationships across cultures.
• Identifies five primary challenges: assumptions about the nature of research and knowledge production; cultural differences in power and status; differing needs for saving face; cultural differences in communication styles; expectations about following rules.
• Includes case studies to promote reflection/discussion about the material and additional resources available for faculty and students at the university.

• Guide for effective supervision based on focus groups and surveys with graduate students and faculty.
• Focus on graduate supervision as a form of pedagogy.
• Offers tips and strategies from experienced supervisors and includes additional resources.

Disclosures

• Notes data on high rates of psychological distress among graduate students and asks students for suggestions on what could be done to improve their wellbeing.
• Identifies nine primary themes within responses, the four most prominent being: culture and community; support services; supervisors and supervision practices; peer engagement and networking.
• Argues for a refined roadmap of policy, action and research to better understand and address high levels of psychological distress.
• Findings suggest that graduate students are likely to benefit from a whole-of-university approach to supporting their wellbeing, and from an academic research culture that values the wellbeing of all its members.

• Study conducted in Spring, 2021 found nearly eight out of 10 professors had a one-on-one conversation with a student about mental health in the previous 12 months, but less than 30 per cent reported receiving training from their institution.
• One in five faculty report having 10+ conversations with students about their mental or emotional health.
• 70 per cent of professors want to better understand mental-health issues and would like training; 61 per cent support mandatory mental-health crisis response training for faculty.
• One in five professors report their own mental health suffered through supporting students without support/training.
• Nearly 50 per cent agree or strongly agree that their institution should invest more resources to support faculty mental health and wellbeing.

• University staff often characterized as useless “administrative bloat.” They have little say in institution governance and lack protections to express disagreement with policies.
• Staff need to be proactively given a voice and treated as colleagues. They could be allies to faculty and students in disagreeing with administration.
• Little support, or active discouragement, of faculty-staff collaboration leads to overtaxed faculty.
• Need to overhaul governance system and create permanent structures that meaningfully integrate staff into governance and addressing problems on campus (rather than more ad hoc committees or temporary empowerment).

Zoom Fatigue

• Interview study to understand supervisors' professional identity, perception of stress in supervision and wellbeing/resilience strategies.
• Identifies three primary categories from responses: 1) personal (relationships), 2) learning (research stress, helping students across conceptual thresholds, feelings of uncertainty and letting students down), and 3) institutional (expectations, time, balance, language, role as advocate and gatekeeper).
• Details supervisor strategies for wellbeing and resilience.

• Compares doctoral student and supervisor perceptions of supervisory activities across faculties.
• Having similar views about supervision is important — to avoid problems and promote satisfaction and resilience.

• Examines changing trends in graduate student supervision, especially in supervisory environments (e.g. increase in informal and distance supervision).
• Presents a model for the professional development of supervisors engaging in distance supervision that can be adapted and implemented by institutions.

Contentious Authorship

• Focuses on impact of social support on doctoral degree completion.
• Links stress and feelings of social isolation to doctoral attrition.
• States that social support can mediate negative effects of stress.
• Recommends graduate students to: a) align with a small group of academic friends and prepare for inevitable peer competition, b) educate and seek assistance from family members, c) establish good rapport with a doctoral adviser.

• Focuses on what and how supervisors learn from doctoral supervision relationships.
• Supervisors learn about social and political context of supervision (learning the 'rules of the game' and self-protective strategies) and respond differently depending on seniority/cultural capital.
• Supervisors also learn about: Disciplined supervision (creating a professional relationship with students); self and other within the relationship (being more adaptive and responsive to student needs, learning through failure and acknowledging power dynamics); their own academic discipline (gaining insights from students).

• Investigates impacts of common mismatches between PhD candidates and supervisors on research training outcomes and mental health.
• PhD candidates and supervisors differ in expectations of guidance given and in the perceived impact of the relationship on mental wellbeing.
• Supervisors believe they give more guidance to candidates than candidates perceive.
• Personal expectations and research progress negatively influenced over half of all candidates’ mental health.
• Provides four suggestions to supervisors to increase effective communication, avoid potential conflict and promote candidate success and wellbeing.

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Videos

Theatrical Scripts

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Setting up the Session

Preparing Technology

Group Introductions

Pronouns

Session Outline

Video Meeting Etiquette

• Mute the mic when joining and listening, to reduce background noise. Unmute to speak.
• Show their presence by using video if possible (a lot of communication is non-verbal) and use a virtual background if they wish to protect those around them.
• Avoid disclosing sensitive, personal information about themselves or others during the discussion. If they do share personal experiences, mention roles rather than names (for example, “my faculty advisor,” or “the program director”).
• Close all background applications to avoid accidentally displaying any sensitive information when screen sharing.

Note Taking

Emotional Responses

Discussion Flow

Subtle Messaging

Tough Crowds

Handling Triggers

Repetitions

Facilitator Neutrality

Online Engagement Tools

• Padlet: Post questions in the Padlet canvas and participants can respond anonymously by double-clicking anywhere on the screen. We suggest you take time to comment on the participants’ answers, which can be used to guide the discussion process. Add your own questions to this Padlet example used in our pilot sessions.
• Zoom’s Annotate feature: Show a Microsoft PowerPoint slide with a question and a series of suggested responses. Participants can then tick or stamp all the options they agree with. Examples will be suggested in the following discussion questions section.

• Ensure you lay out your questions clearly. Effective questions contain enough information so participants can easily identify what they are asked to reflect on.
• Provide time for participants to respond to questions before jumping in to reframe them. Consider waiting at least three seconds (tip: count to ~five) before speaking.
• Make sure that the discussion is inclusive of all participants. If one or more individuals dominate the discussion, you may consider directly addressing quieter participants and inviting them to voice their ideas.

When Discussion is Not “Working”

• Warm Call: Give one particular participant a heads up that you’ll be asking them to contribute or respond to a question in a little bit.
• Area Call: Call on an area of the room rather than a single person. You can also warm call an area. (For example, you could say, “PhD students,” or “science students,” according to your group’s make-up.)
• Patience Game: Wait for a certain number of hands to be raised before you call on someone.
• Freeze Frame: Pause the discussion and ask participants to reflect on what was just said or how the discussion has progressed thus far.

Strategies for Maintaining Neutrality

• Facilitators introduce themselves in the beginning and explain why they’re passionate about this work.
• Facilitators say: “I might step out of my neutral role here and say x y z.”
• Facilitators try to build on other points made previously in the discussion, and then return the question to the group.
• Facilitators make a point using the third person, emphasizing that this does not represent their point of view, but they understand where it is coming from.

• Interview study to understand supervisors' professional identity, perception of stress in supervision and wellbeing/resilience strategies.
• Identifies three primary categories from responses: 1) personal (relationships), 2) learning (research stress, helping students across conceptual thresholds, feelings of uncertainty and letting students down), and 3) institutional (expectations, time, balance, language, role as advocate and gatekeeper).
• Details supervisor strategies for wellbeing and resilience.

• Compares doctoral student and supervisor perceptions of supervisory activities across faculties.
• Having similar views about supervision is important — to avoid problems and promote satisfaction and resilience.

• Examines changing trends in graduate student supervision, especially in supervisory environments (e.g. increase in informal and distance supervision).
• Presents a model for the professional development of supervisors engaging in distance supervision that can be adapted and implemented by institutions.

Zoom Fatigue

Contentious Authorship

No Other Choice

Disclosures

• Focuses on impact of social support on doctoral degree completion.
• Links stress and feelings of social isolation to doctoral attrition.
• States that social support can mediate negative effects of stress.
• Recommends graduate students to: a) align with a small group of academic friends and prepare for inevitable peer competition, b) educate and seek assistance from family members, c) establish good rapport with a doctoral adviser.

• Focuses on what and how supervisors learn from doctoral supervision relationships.
• Supervisors learn about social and political context of supervision (learning the 'rules of the game' and self-protective strategies) and respond differently depending on seniority/cultural capital.
• Supervisors also learn about: Disciplined supervision (creating a professional relationship with students); self and other within the relationship (being more adaptive and responsive to student needs, learning through failure and acknowledging power dynamics); their own academic discipline (gaining insights from students).

• Investigates impacts of common mismatches between PhD candidates and supervisors on research training outcomes and mental health.
• PhD candidates and supervisors differ in expectations of guidance given and in the perceived impact of the relationship on mental wellbeing.
• Supervisors believe they give more guidance to candidates than candidates perceive.
• Personal expectations and research progress negatively influenced over half of all candidates’ mental health.
• Provides four suggestions to supervisors to increase effective communication, avoid potential conflict and promote candidate success and wellbeing.

• Focus on common areas of conflict in supervisory relationships with international graduate students.
• Argues need for conflict management and prevention in these relationships (involving a third person who is nonjudgmental, will offer solutions and has conflict management training).
• Outlines common sources of conflict: differing expectations about responsibilities and relationship; lack of useful feedback; differing values about important skills; lack of respect, openness, time, support/guidance and communication.

• Highlights recurring challenges, discusses impact of culture on the relationship and provides concrete suggestions for building positive relationships across cultures.
• Identifies five primary challenges: assumptions about the nature of research and knowledge production; cultural differences in power and status; differing needs for saving face; cultural differences in communication styles; expectations about following rules.
• Includes case studies to promote reflection/discussion about the material and additional resources available for faculty and students at the university.

• Guide for effective supervision based on focus groups and surveys with graduate students and faculty.
• Focus on graduate supervision as a form of pedagogy.
• Offers tips and strategies from experienced supervisors and includes additional resources.

• Notes data on high rates of psychological distress among graduate students and asks students for suggestions on what could be done to improve their wellbeing.
• Identifies nine primary themes within responses, the four most prominent being: culture and community; support services; supervisors and supervision practices; peer engagement and networking.
• Argues for a refined roadmap of policy, action and research to better understand and address high levels of psychological distress.
• Findings suggest that graduate students are likely to benefit from a whole-of-university approach to supporting their wellbeing, and from an academic research culture that values the wellbeing of all its members.

• Study conducted in Spring, 2021 found nearly eight out of 10 professors had a one-on-one conversation with a student about mental health in the previous 12 months, but less than 30 per cent reported receiving training from their institution.
• One in five faculty report having 10+ conversations with students about their mental or emotional health.
• 70 per cent of professors want to better understand mental-health issues and would like training; 61 per cent support mandatory mental-health crisis response training for faculty.
• One in five professors report their own mental health suffered through supporting students without support/training.
• Nearly 50 per cent agree or strongly agree that their institution should invest more resources to support faculty mental health and wellbeing.

• University staff often characterized as useless “administrative bloat.” They have little say in institution governance and lack protections to express disagreement with policies.
• Staff need to be proactively given a voice and treated as colleagues. They could be allies to faculty and students in disagreeing with administration.
• Little support, or active discouragement, of faculty-staff collaboration leads to overtaxed faculty.
• Need to overhaul governance system and create permanent structures that meaningfully integrate staff into governance and addressing problems on campus (rather than more ad hoc committees or temporary empowerment).

• Examines PhD student satisfaction across 63 universities in 20 countries.
• Finds that supervisor supportiveness, along with academic qualities and supportiveness of departments, has greatest impact on PhD student satisfaction.
• Explores how increased satisfaction would contribute to PhD student wellbeing and performance.

• Reviews current literature on PhD candidates’ mental health, with four primary outcomes: 1) Issues affecting PhD candidate mental health are multifaceted and interrelated, 2) need better alignment between interventions and stressors identified in literature, 3) need better designed, standardized instruments to validate stressors and evaluate interventions, 4) need updated typologies that include the full range of stressors.
• Discusses connection between PhD candidate mental health and supervisor relationships and whole research ecosystem.
• Examines interventions for mental health among PhD candidates, finding: 1) they are not well aligned to contributing factors, 2) they are focused on treating symptoms rather than underlying causes of mental health issues.

• Found: a decline in graduate student wellbeing from 2009 to 2014; lower degree of satisfaction for women; wellbeing declines with advancing stages of doctorate.
• Threats to wellbeing include developmental and career uncertainty, along with changing contexts and communities.
• Top 10 impacts on wellbeing similar between earlier and later study, but the impact was greater in 2014. (Supervisory issues fall in the middle of the top 10.)
• Four primary recommendations: Enhance integrated support for doctoral students, in particular female students; improve support for later stage doctoral researchers; develop training and understanding of wellbeing for all staff who engage with doctoral students; improve signposting of support to all (staff and students).

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