Sphinx

Just in time for Mental Health Awareness Week, I spent most of Friday in a training course with departmental colleagues on Mental Health First Aid, aimed at improving our understanding of mental health and our ability to help support students and colleagues. Highly recommended for all teachers in higher education, if you get a chance (we did the one-day course specially for higher education, rather than the half-day taster or the two-day full qualification); plenty of things that I found moderately annoying, especially the ridiculously small amount of space left for discussion in order to fit everything essential into the day, but the ratio of useful stuff to moderately annoying stuff was far better than on the majority of training courses I’ve done over the years.

Oddly, even paradoxically, the thing that felt most frustrating about the day was also the crucial lesson: the sharing of experience, or not. I’d wondered, before the course started, how much to say about my own mental health if asked; in the event, of course, there was no such question, and it was a matter rather of deciding how much, if at all, to share in the discussion, or how far to indicate that one’s comments were coming from personal experience – and actually very little scope even for that, just enough time for one or two people to say something on each topic before we were being hurried along to sum up and move on to the next thing. Obviously the point of the course was to impart information rather than share confidences, but it still felt at times a little like a denial of particular experience, where we could have learnt a lot from each other, in favour of vague generalisations and statistics.

I did get to the point of wondering whether it wouldn’t be better not to have any discussion segments at all, relieving the pressure on all of us of having to decide how much to say, and removing the frustration of then not being able to say it – and the risk of getting impatient with other people’s anecdotes. Everyone’s experience of poor mental health is different, as the course rightly emphasised; allowing us more time to talk might have helped put that point across – but it could also have led to a dialogue of the deaf, with each of us competing to communicate our own experience as the one that matters most. Which of course it does, to us; and so naturally we seek acknowledgement of this, and recognition from others, even at the risk of seeming to downgrade their experience.

And this is the lesson: sometimes, you need to learn not to share. If a student comes to me to talk about their depression, it’s very tempting to launch into a “yes, I know exactly you feel” routine – to express empathy, to recognise what they’re going through, to lessen the stigma of mental illness, to offer some hope that these things can be survived and managed. But I don’t know exactly how they feel; and at best this becomes a matter of me talking rather than them, which isn’t good, and, worse, they may feel that I’m trying to substitute my story for theirs. If I can listen to a general factual account of depression and its most common features, carefully hedged about with the qualification that it’s different for everyone, and still feel an instinctive angry reaction that this isn’t how it is for me, then it’s unlikely to help any of my students or colleagues to be regaled with anecdotes about my individual experience.

Of course this doesn’t imply a refusal to admit ever to having problems; there are times when such openness and honesty can be useful for others, as well as for ourselves. But the crucial issue, in the moment, has to be: what does this distressed person in front of me need most, now? They don’t need my story; it’s not going to make any difference to them whether the person they’re talking to has had similar experiences or not, so long as they are listened to, and supported, and offered help.

Sharing experiences, or just sharing the fact that there are experiences that could be shared, is something for another time; with colleagues, most obviously (and what we really need is not a different approach to the training course so much as a separate opportunity for such conversations). Should we share with students at all? I can see a case that it may help them feel they can approach us, that we’re human too – and I can see a case that it’s better to allow them to believe in us as confident, proper adults to whom they can, in extremis, abandon responsibility.

But if we go with the first view, the time to do it is when our students are at their most confident and least in need of support – not when they’re too vulnerable to represent any sort of threat to us if we open up…