Mental Health Awareness Week

The Student Mental Health Research Network (SMaRteN) and Vitae have surveyed doctoral researchers and early career research staff in UK universities about the impact of the COVID-19 restrictions on their working lives.

Some initial findings have been published

For a visual summary of the initial findings, we have shared some presentation slides here.

In May 2020 we held a #vitaechat Twitter chat focused on the Mental Health Awareness Weeks' theme of kindness and what that means in the academic context.

Topics discussed included gender, research culture, working relationships, collegiality, empathetic leadership, and how researcher developers can support a culture of kindness in academia.

In March 2018 Research England and OfS awarded £1.5M to 17 projects to support the wellbeing of postgraduate researchers through the Catalyst Fund.

These projects have created many resources to support postgraduate researcher mental health and wellbeing.

The Wellbeing When Writing project was run by the University of Westminster during 2018-19, funded by Research England’s Catalyst Fund and match funding from the University of Westminster.

The resources developed will help both postgraduate researchers and researcher developers.

The mental health and wellbeing lens has been developed with the Univeristy of Portsmouth as part of the Catalyst Fund. It provides an overview of attitudes and behaviours that will be useful for researchers to support their own and others' wellbeing and mental health.

The lens aims to improve wellbeing in the research community by focusing on creating a healthy environment and culture. This is one of a series of lenses on the Vitae Researcher Development Framework (RDF).

Developed by the University of Manchester and Vitae as an output from their Catalyst Funded project, the decision trees provide practical advice, resources and supportive wellbeing interventions for both postgraduate researchers (PGRs) and their supervisors at the University of Manchester.

Using the same concept, Vitae have developed a generic set for doctoral candidates and supervisors which we are calling signposts that are available as editable templates for use by other institutions.