Salutogenic Conditions for Mental Health: Unravelling the Undergraduate Learning Environment

The significance of the learning environment to students’ mental health is well recognised in recent calls for universities to adopt a whole university approach to mental health. However, how to cultivate student mental health-enabling undergraduate learning environments has received very little research attention. The primary aim of my research, therefore, was to gain an understanding of how the undergraduate learning environment is characterised in terms of inter and extra-personal salutogenic conditions conducive to students’ mental health. To achieve this aim, I conducted a generic qualitative inquiry. Using the Open University’s ‘Our Journey’ tool, this involved interviewing 12 final-year undergraduate students about their experiences of the learning environment, understood as students’ only guaranteed point of contact with their university (academic staff and the curriculum). In the main, participants identified as white British heterosexual females, the majority of whom were aged 20 or 21. Most were full-time students from the following disciplines: social science, natural and applied science, and business studies. I used thematic analysis to analyse the data generated by the interviews (also included in the data corpus were data from an interview I conducted to pilot test the ‘Our Journey’ tool). From this, three themes emerged: ‘Trials and Tribulation in the Learning Environment’; ‘Care and Acknowledgment in the Learning Environment’; and ‘Connectedness in the Learning Environment’. Of these, the theme ‘Trials and Tribulations in the Learning Environment’ was by far the most populated in terms of the number of experiences participants recounted. Using a salutogenesis lens I developed specifically for the purpose, I subsequently analysed the three themes (both within and across) for evidence of inter and extra-personal salutogenic conditions. This revealed that the undergraduate learning environment is evidently limited in terms of salutogenic conditions for students’ mental health. Both generalised resistance resources and the three life experiences postulated to strengthen the sense of coherence (and thereby mental health) are apparently finite in the most part. To the best of my knowledge, I am the first to have investigated how the undergraduate learning environment is characterised in terms of student-mental health enabling conditions from a salutogenesis perspective. Therefore, and especially given the significance of salutogenesis to the whole university approach to mental health and to health promotion more generally, further research is needed in this area if we are to achieve learning environments capable of protecting and enhancing students’ mental health. Significant implications of my research are that it has highlighted a need for course teams and their managers to focus attention on cultivating inter and extra-personal salutogenic conditions for mental health and has culminated in a set of possible ways this can be achieved; for example, making students’ workloads more manageable and strengthening student-staff interpersonal relations. Indeed, I have identified a wide range of salutogenic possibilities, the adoption of which might reasonably be considered onerous. However, to varying extents, course teams will have some of these possibilities already in place. Moreover, they are examples of good teaching practices such as emphasising the social dimensions of teaching and learning and, as such, should not involve academic staff going beyond their professional role. This is not to deny the challenges inherent in the higher education working environment, however, many of which are deemed detrimental to academic staff productivity and impact, not to mention their mental health. Ultimately, therefore, it cannot be ignored that cultivating salutogenic conditions for student mental health requires institutional cultures where the mental health of staff is also taken seriously.