Stress and mental health issues are showing a worrying rise in higher education. Kate Coxon reports
Simon is in his second year as a lecturer at a university in the south-east of England. In an average week he reckons he clocks up more than 60 hours and since starting the job the 28-year-old has lost 9kg. “I’m stressed and overworked there’s no doubt about it,” he says. “There seems to be a committee for just about everything in my university and as a young member of staff I have been lumbered with more than my fair share of administrative duties and meetings. It’s not just about going: all these meetings need to be written up. Stress is everywhere I look. I’ve stopped asking the admin staff to do anything because they are all on the brink of nervous breakdowns so I end up doing more myself.”
Most universities have well-established counselling services for students now these are in demand by staff. But not surprisingly academic staff are often reluctant to seek counselling help from a students’ service (some don’t want to be seen by the students, others say they feel guilty about using student resources). As universities become more aware of their responsibilities under health and safety at work legislation, not to mention their huge absenteeism bills, many are setting up services for their academic and support staff.
Angela Hodgson, a staff counsellor at the University of Central Lancashire, says that in 1995 when the university set up its counselling services there were only two other universities offering staff-only provision. Now there are 75 members in the staff special interest group, which she chairs.
The problem is not just bad pay and long hours. Bruce (36), who spent an unhappy year at a new university as a lecturer in social sciences, said: “I think the greatest source of stress was the lack of autonomy: having my workload including teaching responsibilities dictated to me by a manager with little expertise in the field.
“I was astounded by the exploitation of hourly-paid staff. Teaching was routinely delegated to postgraduates who had barely finished their own degrees yet who were expected to teach second- and third-level courses unsupported. The bureaucracy was unbelievable, too. There was chronic bullying of staff by management.”
A large-scale survey of university staff carried out in 1998 for the Association of University Teachers (AUT) found that 70% considered their jobs stressful. The same survey suggests that psychological well-being among university staff is very poor indeed: a quarter of respondents reported suffering from a stress-related illness necessitating time off work in the last year, and 53% were suffering from depression and anxiety.
All the signs are that stress is worsening. A survey of staff at one institution this year by the lecturers’ union Natfhe found that 88% of respondents had suffered from stress-related health problems in the past year, with consequences ranging from strokes to high blood pressure and alcohol abuse. The same union reports that the number of calls to its 24-hour stress helpline have increased considerably over the past few years. The AUT notes a sharp rise in retirements due to ill health and an increase in complaints of bullying by managers among its members.
In a sector where the threat of redundancy is very real, job insecurity leads to an atmosphere of increased competition, which fuels the culture of long working hours. “In the 1998 survey, almost a quarter of staff regularly worked in excess of 55 hours a week, and the spillover between home and work life was striking,” says Gail Kinman, lecturer and researcher in psychology at the University of Luton, which carried out the 1998 survey.
Both lecturers’ unions welcome increased staff counselling services, but they caution that it may be used as a sticking plaster and argue that the problems need to be tackled at source. “We are going to be campaigning for a better regulation taskforce to sort out the issue of quality inspections and red tape,” says David Triesman, AUT general secretary. Natfhe will shortly be launching a Web-based survey in an attempt to quantify teaching hours and workloads.
Earlier this year the Higher Education Funding Council for England commissioned a 220 000 national study of occupational stress in the sector. The three-year project will carry out a benchmarking exercise in 17 universities and colleges to assess levels of stress. This will enable comparisons to be made with other professions as well as within the sector.
Strategies to combat stress will then be put into place in the 17 institutions and evaluated.
Professor Gary Cooper, who will lead the project, is fully aware of the sticking plaster issue: “We are not going to be teaching lecturers to meditate, or putting aquariums in their rooms. We realise stress is a major problem in higher education and through this project we want to try and identify and tackle the structural problems in institutions that cause stress and to make these working environments less stressful.