Something isn’t working: 65% of students report feeling stressed all the time or often, 57% percent report feeling anxious, worried or overwhelmed all the time or often, and 90% of faculty say student mental health is significantly worse now than when they began their careers.
Faculty aren’t faring much better, with 50% reporting burnout and 39% reporting emotional exhaustion. Even more alarming, 47% have reported that supporting students in mental and emotional distress has taken a toll on their own mental and emotional health, meaning one of the most essential relationships on campus—that between faculty and student, teacher and learner, researcher and apprentice—is now loaded with a new kind of duty, one for which our faculty are ill-prepared.
And what about staff? Well, staff turnover is increasing, the percentage of employees expressing general job satisfaction is declining, and more than a quarter say their institutional leaders do not care about their mental health and well-being. Meanwhile, on the national level, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, Surgeon General of the United States, is warning of an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation” in the United States.
These data aren’t hard to come by. We are awash in evidence that something isn’t working on our campuses or, so it seems, in our society in general. For those of us leading universities, adding more mental health counselors is not the answer. We must think differently about the student experience, reaching beyond our go-to toolkit of mentoring and advising, clubs and activities, climbing walls and fitness centers to create a new kind of campus community.
Healthy students require healthy campus communities, which implies that faculty aren’t burned out, staff aren’t running for the doors, and students aren’t chronically stressed. In the same way providing free lunch to grade schoolers translates into better learning, becoming a whole health university translates into a better experience for students—and ultimately a better future.
What Is Whole Health?
Whole health is about comprehensive well-being, not merely the absence of illness. It’s about living a full and meaningful life, empowered and equipped to address all aspects of well-being—mental, physical and spiritual. In healthcare settings, whole healthcare prioritizes disease prevention, health and well-being over disease management. It gives primacy to an individual’s health in alignment with their life’s mission, aspiration and purpose and to the importance of nurturing relationships and supportive communities in overall well-being.
The Veterans Administration, the largest integrated healthcare system in the country, successfully modeled the whole health approach, showing improved patient outcomes and satisfaction with employees reporting less burnout and greater motivation. Influential national and international organizations (including the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine, the Surgeon General of the United States and the World Health Organization) are advocating for whole health, recognizing its transformative potential extends beyond our healthcare systems into our communities.
Universities have a leadership role to play in the whole health movement. Our universities are, after all, communities and therefore have a significant impact on the whole health of students, faculty and staff. Becoming a whole health university does not require a radical reimagining of the university; universities have long been concerned with our students’ personal and professional development and more recently with our responsibility to promote student thriving. Rather, becoming a whole health university requires an extension of these historical motivations to include all members of the university community; to expand the definition of student, staff and faculty development to include whole health; and to incorporate the foundational elements of whole health across the university.
Importantly, the whole health university aligns with the academy’s long commitment to serving the public good. To serve the public good today, the academy must embrace the principles and practices of whole health alongside our traditional responsibilities of advancing human knowledge, promoting mobility and equity, and educating an informed citizenry. The whole health university adapts whole health principles to its campus community by creating an institutional culture in which all members can thrive.
Becoming a Whole-Health University
Southern California University of Health Sciences is on the road to becoming a whole-health university. We’ve launched the first-ever Doctor of Whole Health Leadership degree. We’re cohosting a whole health conference in October, providing funding for several of our faculty and students to attend. We’ve established standards for becoming a whole health university, akin to the standards one might see from an accreditation agency, and we’ve evaluated ourselves against them. (Any university can achieve these standards, regardless of size, type or mission.) We are partnering with the Academy of Integrative Health and Medicine, a leading interprofessional community of healthcare providers, researchers and academics, to create an official institutional recognition as a whole health university.
We’ve identified the following as foundational elements of a whole health university:
- Mission and values that reflect a commitment to the principles of whole health, including the adoption of a formal statement of whole health principles
- Employee benefits and resources that reflect a commitment to the principles of whole health such as equitable pay practices, flexible work environment and generous time-off policies
- Student services and resources that place special emphasis on student thriving, including empowering and equipping students to find their sense of meaning and purpose
- Faculty training and development that reflect the value of faculty, the importance of their work and the unique power of their relationship to students
- Curricular and cocurricular learning outcomes that provide students with foundational knowledge in whole health and equip them to bring the principles of whole health into their future career
- A physical and virtual environment that reflects the importance of self-care and community, accessibility and inclusivity, and a deep understanding of the ways environment contributes to spiritual, physical and mental health
- Support for scholarship that advances the whole health field in a manner befitting that university’s programs, disciplines and mission
We still have work to do. We need to appoint a chief whole health officer. We need to develop a whole health orientation program, create a new whole health experience and address other deficiencies based upon our newly established whole health university standards. We are working closely with the whole health experts at the Cornerstone Collaboration for Societal Change to ensure fidelity to principles and practices of whole health, as adapted to the university environment.
The Future of Whole Health
If you are interested in learning more about becoming a designated whole health university, reach out to tamararozhon@scuhs.edu
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