More than a third of university academics have accessed mental health services through their GP during the past year, and one in five have visited a psychologist to help deal with stress and anxiety, new research has found.
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A Federation University study currently underway, which has so far received more than 550 responses from academics at universities across Australia, identified concerns poor mental health and wellbeing among academic staff.
Long hours, poor workplace cultures, job insecurity, COVID pressures and poor work-life balance have been identified as contributors to stress.
Federation University Associate Professor Elisa Zentveld said it was the first time the mental health and wellbeing of academic staff had been studied in a way that could be directly compared with existing data on the overall mental health and wellbeing of Australian adults.
"One of the things we have seen based on current responses is more than 80 per cent of respondents claim they have been bothered by feeling nervous, anxious or on edge for at least several days in the past few weeks, and for one in five it's almost every day," she said.
People talk about uncertainty and workload issues ... and because of those conversations being heard so often it became a trigger to do this study. We don't really know what the impact is unless we go and find out
- Elisa Zentveld
While 18 per cent of respondents said they had accessed their university's employee assistance program for help, double that number had consulted their GP for mental health support.
Associate Professor Zentveld said that could be because academics did not want to flag to their employees that they were struggling.
"They want to choose their own GP or psychologist, they want to be independent and don't necessarily want a paper trail ... it's something the university doesn't know."
Some respondents to the Understanding Academic Staff Workload and Health survey said their mental health concerns had been so severe they had visited the emergency department (1.5 per cent), seen a psychiatrist (8.6 per cent), spoken to a counsellor (9 per cent), or called a telephone counselling service such as Lifeline or Beyond Blue (4.5 per cent).
Associate Professor Zentveld said she hoped the findings would open up real conversations between university leaders and staff.
"What we are hoping to do is share this information with universities so they can have some informed data that might help them with decision making and process instead of guessing," she said.
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"People talk about uncertainty and workload issues ... and because of those conversations being heard so often it became a trigger to do this study as we were thinking this seems to be something we hear a lot of but we don't really know about ... and we don't really know what the impact is unless we go and find out."
Staff also talked about workload and the fact there were no proper workload assessments from universities to identify how long it actually takes to do certain tasks such as marking papers or preparing classes and with many universities cutting staff and shifting more workload on to those remaining the pressure was building.
Associate Professor Zentveld said universities interested in how their staff were tracking would probably look at indicators such as sick leave or people tapping in to employee assistance programs without knowing the proportion of staff seeking support via other avenues.
"They've only got limited ways to actually gauge it but we have actually got is people telling us themselves."
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