Mental health

Abstract

Addressing issues of mental health became virtually unavoidable in the AngloAmerican academy during the last decade, particularly in relation to students. Conversations about mental health have begun to proliferate among graduate students and other scholars contingently employed in the academy. The increasing visibility of graduate students experiencing mental and emotional distress is indicative of how the ground upon which “normal” is defined has been shifting rapidly beneath our feet. The relationship between the social and the physiological across different states of mental health is one that continues to be contested among scholars. Studies that examine how the corporatisation of higher education affects mental health are only just starting to appear in geography. One study of geography graduates in the US reveals their co-optation into a neoliberal ethos of individuality, competition and heightened pressures of productivity and performance, resulting in feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, and indicative of a survival-oriented campus culture.