Mental Health Committee

Abstract

The AAA workgroup Mental Health and Wellbeing aims to discuss the working conditions in terms of mental health and well-being of the Department’s teaching and research staff, raising awareness, voicing concerns, and lobbying for structural measures concerning these topics. The high demands that the research and teaching environments at D-ARCH place on studio tutors, PhD candidates, and Postdoc researchers are a major factor in their well-being. The workgroup aims to chart and monitor these challenges, and to serve as a discussion partner to the Department on these issues.

The workgroup’s members are part of the broader, department-wide bottom-up workgroup OMG (‘On Mental Goodness’), which addresses issues of mental health and wellbeing within the Department, across various staff categories and the student body. OMG convenes on an ad hoc basis, for instance, to discuss how to respond to the results of various employee and student surveys, or to organise events to raise awareness of mental health.

Some of the workgroup’s members are part of the Department’s First Responders Network, a network of peer-to-peer support, serving as low-threshold and confidential contact points to exchange thoughts, inform, advise and refer in response to situations of distress and conflict.