Environmental Scan
Through a detailed overview of the mental health landscape in post-secondary institutions across Canada, the Environmental Scan provides examples of emerging and evaluated practices. The scan connects these practices with the six pillars from the Standard and provides concrete ideas on how to bring the Standard to life within your own institution.
Environmental Scan of Practices Aligning with the National Standard for Mental Health and Well-Being for Post-Secondary Students
Abstract:
In 2020, the Canadian Standards Association Group published the National Standard for Mental Health and Well-Being for Post-Secondary Students (“the Standard”), in partnership with the Mental Health Commission of Canada (MHCC). The Standard offers a set of guidelines to help post-secondary institutions and campuses support and promote the mental health of their students. This paper highlights the results of an environmental scan of Canadian exemplary practices aligning with the strategic pillars of the Standard. This scan was conducted using a two-pronged approach, involving a search of the academic literature for evaluated practices aligning with the Standard, as well as a comprehensive search of 148 anglophone-Canadian post-secondary institutions’ websites for emerging practices aligning with the Standard. Results indicate a dearth of both evaluated and emerging practices in the pillars of early intervention as well as crisis management and postvention. The authors recommend that post-secondary institutions focus their attention on these pillars in their implementation of the Standard on their campuses.
Introduction
In 2020, the Canadian Standards Association Group published the National Standard for Mental Health and Well-Being for Post-Secondary Students (“the Standard”), in partnership with the Mental Health Commission of Canada (MHCC). The Standard offers a set of flexible guidelines to help post-secondary institutions and campuses support and promote the mental health of their students.
According to a cross-sectional trend analysis of the NCHA II survey data on Canadian post-secondary student mental health and well-being, between 2013 and 2019, there were significant increases in the proportion of students reporting symptoms of psychological distress, mental illness diagnoses and help-seeking for mental health-related challenges (Linden et al., 2021). Since that time, the global COVID-19 pandemic has posed a number of new challenges for post-secondary students’ mental health. A meta-analysis examining the global prevalence of mental illness among post-secondary students during the COVID-19 pandemic found that 30% of post-secondary students experienced clinically elevated depressive symptoms, and 28% of students experienced clinically elevated anxiety symptoms (Zhu et al., 2021). These findings highlight the importance of the Standard in establishing guidelines for the provision of mental health services for post-secondary institutions.
Though the need for mental health services and programming has increased in recent years, many universities and colleges across Canada have begun to develop innovative strategies for addressing this need, and many have established programs that already align with the Standard. This paper highlights the results of an environmental scan of practices and programs that align with the Standard and which may serve as examples for post-secondary staff looking to implement the Standard on their campuses. This paper further evaluates strengths and gaps among those programs and practices to determine which elements of the Standard would benefit from further development across Canada.
Methods
This environmental scan was conducted using a two-pronged approach. The first was a review of the Canadian academic literature on mental health interventions for post-secondary students, employing the use of search terms from the strategic pillars of the Standard. In order for an article to be included in this collection of evaluated practices, the intervention needed to be studied in a Canadian post-secondary context, the intervention had to be supported by at least one Canadian research study as an effective strategy for improving student mental health, or suggest a benefit to students’ well-being, and the intervention needed to align with at least one strategic pillar of the Standard. A total of 14 articles were selected for this section of the environmental scan. The search terms used in the Google Scholar platform to find these articles included:
- Mental health
- Post-secondary
- University
- College
- Canada
- Intervention
- Literacy
- Stigma
- Accessibility
- Disability
- Early intervention
- Crisis
- Suicide
The second prong to this environmental scan was a comprehensive review of 148 publicly-funded anglophone Canadian post-secondary institutions’ websites, searching specifically for programs highlighted within the wellness, counseling, accessibility, and equity pages of the website.
A program or policy was considered an emerging practice when it demonstrated innovation or addressed student mental health outside of the typical student-counselor relationship. The list of post-secondary institutions was developed based on data from the Centre for Education Statistics at Statistics Canada and the membership list from Colleges & Institutes Canada. A total of 139 programs and policies were selected for this section of the environmental scan, and a thematic analysis was applied to those programs and policies to evaluate strengths and gaps in mental health support across Canadian post-secondary institutions.