The Innovation Hub will continue its partnership with Health & Wellness with a focus on how students take care of their mental health. We will explore student needs and perspectives surrounding how they support their own mental health to inform future program and service design.
Our Findings
We found that students face significant challenges with transitioning into university and navigating the academic rigour required to succeed. We noticed that students who prioritize their mental health find the courage to take radical action that defies the status quo of pushing harder to achieve their academic goals. When students take these brave steps, they experience perspective shifts, empowering them to create more balance between academics and other aspects of their life. These perspective shifts enable students to experience positive mental health while facing the same academic rigour.
Our vision for the project is that when students make brave choices, they build lifelong resilience.
Our findings play out in five themes:
- The Cost of “Excellence”
- Permission to Take Care of Myself
- Making Radical Choices to Be Okay
- Trustworthy Support
- Perspective Shifts
Empowering and supporting students to make brave choices to prioritize their mental health amidst the competing priorities in their daily life is key to helping them build lifelong resilience. The data and insights discussed in this report will help inform Health and Wellness, as well as other supports and services at U of T, on the design of non-clinical resources and activities that could be implemented for U of T students to help individuals and diverse populations with different mental health challenges. Learn more by accessing our report, which is linked below.
Our Findings
Our work with Health & Wellness began in Summer 2021. Select the project to learn more about its focus and findings.
2021-2022
For this project the Innovation Hub will continue to partner with Health and Wellness to support the transformation and delivery of mental health supports and services at St. George campus. As part of this project, the Innovation Hub will support the engagement of students to better understand their needs in mental health supports use co-creation methods to bring students into the services redesign work.
Summer 2021: How might mental health supports on St. George campus meet student needs?
The Innovation Hub partnered with Health and Wellness to support the transformation and delivery of mental health supports and services at St. George campus. As part of this new project, the Innovation Hub developed and facilitated a series of brainstorming sessions with students to better understand their needs and inform messaging, communication and first interactions for mental health support on St. George campus.
