Mapping the 'wellness complex': Examining graduate student mental health through a critical disability studies lens


Savitri Persaud, University of Toronto

In Canada and internationally, the high rates of mental health reported among postsecondary students have been a point of concern, with various policies, strategies, and other interventions introduced as a result. However, the research underpinning these interventions has very predominantly been grounded in a biomedical orientation. Further, the focus has primarily centred on undergraduate students, with relatively little attention paid to the distinct needs and experiences of graduate students. The Mapping the Gaps study aimed to address these gaps through a critical disability-informed examination of graduate student mental health in three Ontario universities. A critical disability studies orientation turns our attention away from the individual student and towards understanding how systems and structures (in this case, the postsecondary institution and related policies and practices) may be producing or exacerbating disabling environments for students, while attending to how interlocking systems of power differently situate students within the institution. To accomplish our objectives, we utilized situational analysis, a postmodern extension of grounded theory that centres the situation (in this case, experiences of sanism in graduate education) as the unit of analysis. Data collection involved three distinct groups of participants: graduate students (n=26; focus groups), faculty (n=14; interviews), and staff (n=4; interviews). Our data analysis process took up conversation as an analytical tool, as our team engaged in a dynamic, dialogic, and iterative process of exchange and mutuality, in conversation with the transcripts and one another, to identify key actors and processes that influence graduate student mental health. Our findings reveal that biomedical and psychocentric understandings of mental health and mental illness dominate university-based programs, supports, and accommodations for graduate students experiencing psychiatric distress – and together make up a sector-wide schema of sanist knowledges and actions that we’ve termed the ‘wellness complex’(i). For example, our student participants described how, in order to access accommodations, they were required to have a psychiatric diagnosis that was documented by a medical professional. In this way, the institution mandated that students align with biomedical conceptualizations of their distress before accommodations would be provided. Alongside biomedicalism, psychocentrism was evidenced in the mental health promotion strategies utilized by institutions, whereby students were directed to take care of their mental health through individualized self-care activities and directions to build ‘resilience’, without attention to the larger, institutional issues contributing to their distress (e.g., inadequate funding packages). These biomedical and psychocentric conceptualizations conflicted with the lived realities of the graduate students in our study, whose experiences were deeply shaped by sanism and other intersecting structural oppressions (e.g., on the basis of race, gender, citizenship status and class, among others). Students experienced sanism from their peers, supervisors, and in wider university settings as a result of sanist standards and values (e.g., regarding independence and productivity) that underlie notions of belonging and success in graduate studies. Finally, our findings highlight the ways in which both students and faculty strive to resist biomedicine and psychocentrism; however, this resistance is largely constrained to individualized, micro-level actions such as individual students advocating to supervisors or faculty members advocating on behalf of an individual student for access to one-off accommodations. Our participants described that macro-level advocacy and changes (e.g., to the protocols and policies that produce the need for student accommodations) were not possible in the context of pervasive sanism and lack of institutional support for collective resistance and advocacy. These findings align with other critical work on madness in the academy, showing that biomedicalism and psychocentrism are largely naturalized in graduate education settings. Further, our analysis brings to the fore the processes whereby the academic institution acts in concert with other systems and structures (e.g., the psy complex, neoliberalism) to produce a ‘wellness complex’, within which responsibility for wellbeing is downloaded onto students (and allied faculty), making invisible the role of larger structural forces in producing graduate student distress. Mapping the ‘wellness complex’ allows us to expose, examine, and challenge normalized sanism and to contribute to necessary systemic change in graduate education; namely, to make space for all students – and particularly those experiencing psychiatric distress or disability – to mobilize, coalition-build, and thrive. (i) Our use of the term the ‘wellness complex’ is related to broader discussions surrounding the ‘wellness industrial complex’ (Gunter, 2019) in terms of the focus on self-responsibilization, disappearance of structural contributors to poor health, and the role of capitalism and neoliberalism. The ‘wellness complex’ as we understand it within postsecondary settings is also different in terms of our focus on how the various actors within and outside the academy come together to make up a sector-wide schema of sanist knowledges and actions.

Non-presenting authors: Jennifer Myer, University of Windsor; Fady Shanouda, Carleton University; Merrick Pilling, Toronto Metropolitan University; Kendra-Ann Pitt, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine; Jijian Voronka, University of Windsor; Lori Ross, University of Toronto

This paper will be presented at the following session: