2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Stigma of mental health conditions within engineering culture and its relation to help-seeking attitudes: Insights from the first year of a longitudinal study

Presented at Promoting Well-Being in Engineering Education: Strategies and Perspectives

Colleges and universities are trying to keep pace with the increasing mental health needs of students. However, it has been documented that students’ attitudes towards seeking help are still a barrier to the use of available resources, and such attitudes vary across student subpopulations, with engineering students being less likely to seek help for mental health conditions (MHCs) than students in other fields when they need it. Given the high-stress culture that has been promoted in the engineering field, it is important to explore the barriers that exist to our students’ help-seeking attitudes and the behaviors that would support their mental health and, consequently, their academic success. In addition, it is unknown how these barriers prevail as engineering students graduate and transition to their first professional engineering experiences.

This paper reports on the initial findings from our longitudinal study exploring the relationships between stigma and help-seeking attitudes of engineering undergraduates and professionals. We present exploratory quantitative and qualitative results from the data collected at one of our two institutions in Fall 2022, and the immediate next steps in our planned analysis. We summarize some of the contextual challenges we faced in the first year of execution of this multi-institutional project.

We found a negative correlation between general social and college-specific measures of stigma and help-seeking attitudes, as well as between engineering-specific measures of stigma and help-seeking attitudes. Only those that were engineering-specific changed in strength among women and students with MHC experience. When considering elements of engineering, we found that perceptions of department diversity and care were not related to help-seeking attitudes, nor were the engineering identity or belonging measures. However, our newly proposed items to measure beliefs of engineering culture based on competition and meritocracy showed a negative correlation with help-seeking attitudes. The identified correlations were weaker among women and students with MHCs. This aligned with our qualitative results in which students shared how they perceived engineering to be harder than other majors and their engineering experiences and duties becoming their “whole life,” while leaving no time for mental health. In addition, they also identified the lack of mental health conversations in engineering spaces.

Authors

Matilde Luz Sánchez-Peña http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3511-0694 University at Buffalo, The State University of New York [biography]

Dr. Matilde Sánchez-Peña is an assistant professor of Engineering Education at University at Buffalo – SUNY where she leads the Diversity Assessment Research in Engineering to Catalyze the Advancement of Respect and Equity (DAREtoCARE) Lab. Her research focuses on the development of cultures of care and wellbeing in engineering education spaces, assessing gains in institutional efforts to advance equity an inclusion, and the use of data science for training socially responsible engineers.
Dr. Anne M. McAlister http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4155-251X University at Buffalo [biography]

Anne M. McAlister is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Engineering Education at the University at Buffalo. Her research focuses on engineering identity, social justice, and equity with the goal of broadening ideas about who engineers are and what they do in order to empower students to tackle the big issues in today’s world through engineering. Dr. McAlister has a PhD in Education and a MS in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia. She has a BS in Chemical Engineering from The Ohio State University.
Nichole Ramirez Purdue University [biography]

Nichole Ramirez is the Assistant Director of the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) program at Purdue University. She holds a Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Purdue University. She is also an involved member of NAMI at the local and state levels. She advises NAMI on Campus Purdue and helped launch Ending the Silence, a NAMI Signature program for the state of Indiana.
Dr. Douglas B. Samuel [biography]

My research focuses on the development of dimensional trait models of mental health problems and their application in clinical practice.
Mr. Syed Ali Kamal University at Buffalo, The State University of New York [biography]

Syed Ali Kamal is a doctoral student at the Department of Engineering Education at University at Buffalo. He is working as a graduate research assistant at the DARE to CARE lab. His research interests lie in the area of social justice and issues related to diversity, equity and Inclusion.
Xinrui Xu Huazhong University of Science and Technology [biography]

Xinrui (Rose) Xu graduated from Purdue University School of Engineering Education. Currently, she works at Huazhong University of Science and Technology School of Education as an Assistant Professor. Coming from a humanistic and critical perspective, her research promotes understanding and practice that support engineering students to make informed academic and career choices in their late adolescence and early adulthood.

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