Making accommodations isn't always 'kind' (uni)

[Jourdain11]

I'm interested in knowing general opinions on this. I would accept that the last few years have been tough for students, and UG finalists in particular have had their full course horribly disrupted. But I am struck by how the accommodations made for students have really not helped them, in a large proportion of cases. I work in a uni (London Russell Group, competitive and highly-rated) and the number of students who have requested deferrals and so on for MH reasons is huge. In my role, I pushed back a bit and said that we shouldn't be advocating this as a way of dealing with any level of pressure and anxiety. In some cases it was absolutely necessary, but in others I felt that it was just becoming a pattern or a way of buying more time.

Ultimately, in the careers many of these graduates will go on to have, they will have to work to deadlines and deal with pressure, and part of the uni experience is providing preparation for that.

We now have students who are very upset because they cannot graduate with their peers, who are very anxious because they've deferred half their year's assessments to a one-werk resits period and feel they will not cope, or who are just disappointed that they haven't completed the year and have uncertainty as regards progression. Plus those who have now come to see assessment as an absolutely terrifying and insurmountable thing because we have agreed that they clearly weren't capable of sitting their exams, when they probably were.

Overall, I feel that we need to be encouraging coping strategies and empowering students, rather than encouraging them to opt out on the most tenuous rationale. But some of my colleagues would consider this to be virtually heresy and I'm not sure how we're going to get out of this place we have found ourselves in.

I’m not sure why people think staff have no idea about MH issues when in my experience nearly all school/college, and I will also assume university, staff are suffering high levels of stress and anxiety themselves. Nearly all of us know first-hand that is it beneficial to deal with an issue, not put things off, tackle everyday worrying situations such as exams or presentations head-on.

What concerns me is that we are expected by a lot of students to absorb their stress as well as already having our own. In some respects this has always been part of the job but it’s really ramped up. I can think of a few students who just bombard teachers with emails and get shirty when they’re basically just asking for reassurance about an assignment and are directed back to the comprehensive document already supplied that answers all the questions! We’re just meant to endlessly go back over the same things to deal with someone else’s anxiety and that really doesn’t seem helpful to me. Add in the parents and it adds up to a lot of time and mental load we weren’t previously expected to spend.

This feels very familiar

My grad employee has come to work crying numerous times, etc, and has taken to telling me about her boyfriend problems in her review meetings. I've had to say to her 'these are work meetings, and please understand that I don't really care or need to know about your boyfriend. When you're at work I'd like you to focus on the task at hand'.

But it all comes under the banner of 'anxiety'. As if none of us ever had shitty boyfriends and went to work anyway.

We’ve just gone to block teaching so the little snowflakes don’t have to juggle deadlines or think about more than one thing at a time (or so we get better outcomes and move up the league table depending on your viewpoint).

God knows how any of them will cope with a job with actual stress. Although that said most of ours end up working in Tesco so perhaps it doesn’t matter….

Yes I am a bit disillusioned if you hadn’t guessed.

They can't be worked away, logic-ed away, put in a box when you feel like it, kicked down the road. To others they often look as if there is nothing really wrong.

Maybe those suffering from these conditions are just not ready for university, then?

What I see happening- and I’ve been teaching in universities in 3 countries for about 30 years all told - is that such “hard cases” are tending to distort the very nature of the kind of education we offer in a university.

Universities are not simply extensions of school. They are a different way of learning appropriate for young adults who, at university age, can legally marry, have children, vote, go to war and etc etc etc.

I also think people talking about employers needing to make "accomodations" to help people isn't actually helping. Sometimes you do just need to do the job as requested or find a new job. People are asking for more and more requests that just don't work. A friend of mine runs a small business. 5 employees. She took on a receptionist who only worked for 6 months then went maternity leave. All fine. When she was due back she worked a week then said she was too stressed to work. Was signed off for 6 weeks total with stress. Then came back for another week and for signed off again. Then while signed off put in a request for part time working. They agreed to part time hours of 2.5 days a week. (Was a pain for the boss as couldn't find a 2.5 day a week receptionist for the other half so the rest of the staff had to do it on top of their jobs). She then worked 2 weeks at 2.5 days a week then got signed off again and requested 1 day a week in the office and 1.5 days from home. When they said no (because you can't do the reception job from home!) she threatened action saying they weren't making reasonable adjustments for her mental health struggles.
The company took on a receptionist for 5 days a week. Over the course of almost 2 years this woman barely worked there. The company had to keep either paying for temps or the other staff did the job on top of their own. A receptionist job is pretty standard. People shouldn't get annoyed when they are actually expected to do the job in the place the job is! If the company needed a one day a week receptionist they would have advertised for one. You can't take a 5 day a week position and then complain when they won't let you do one day regardless of mental health issues. In real life that job just wasn't for her anymore. Sometimes you need to accept that and just say sorry I need to look for something more suited to me. There is only so far reasonable adjustments can go. Hence the word reasonable. Which most people seem to ignore.

I’m not sure we have all played a part in this. I’m not old enough to be this generation’s parents, and neither am I well off, or have any of the advantages of the boomer generation. I haven’t changed my teaching practice at all during that time. But I do think (leaving aside those few students who have serious MH issues), that it’s noticeable that this generation have been far more materially advantaged growing up than I could have dreamed as a child.

I get to know mine really well, and they are at the “elite” end of the university spectrum, not allowed to work in term time, so they are not distracted by part time jobs and they aren’t students who shouldn’t be at university. Some come from very wealthy backgrounds indeed, but I’m aware that even the “normal” ones have nice houses, nice holidays, a good standard of living, the latest tech — far more so than I myself do. Yes, of course you can’t judge what someone’s life experiences and mental health are like from how they present; but leaving aside the few who have seriously difficult circumstances, these are kids who have not suffered serious hardship. The pandemic has largely been their only thing to complain about, and whilst it’s been a shit time, they’ve largely not had a bad experience compared to lots of other people!

I’m really struck by the fact that a lot of them seem to say they have found the pandemic terribly destructive to their mental health when they have been largely at home being looked after by mum and dad (and also seeing friends, as that age group were markedly unconcerned about catching Covid, while I sat indoors on Zoom for two years as someone CEV).

I think that not having as full a social life as you would like is definitely bad for mental health. But we’ve all been subject to that over the pandemic, and we’ve also had full time work and family stresses too on top. And I understand that it’s not as simple as saying that they had lots of time at home to work and read — but actually, some of them seem to have done nothing. And then are complaining that they can’t do any work, because they are so anxious precisely because they haven’t done any work. These are kids who haven’t actually faced particular hardship during the pandemic, just boredom and frustration and some depression around frustrated expectations.

I am very sympathetic to those who have had family difficulties or feel isolated and unhappy (a few of mine have been ill and:or been stuck at home in quite isolated places - that’s not fun). And I think it’s obviously crap to have imagined you were going to have a fun university life and then spent a year of it at home with mum and dad, that’s shit, I agree. But as a life experience it isn’t that bad. Here, staff have been absolutely crushed by it all, and my institution was literally doling out the extensions for students who had just not got their act together, whilst massively upping workload and with NO allowances or accommodation for homeschooling whatsoever. I was refused furlough and told I would just have to manage with a preteen at home plus way more than my usual workload and that was tough. I’m barely recovered from it all even now, so students complaining to me that they didn’t have a social life during lockdown is leaving me a little 😬

And if they were telling me that they were suffering psychosis and extreme depression that would be one thing; but actually they are telling me that they’re annoyed that they didn’t have the “full university experience” and missed out on social events and “found it difficult to concentrate”. Fair enough; but does that mean you can’t meet an essay deadline for two years? Or just not do any of the reading you’ve been asked to do?

Now there are plenty of people on the thread saying we aren’t sympathetic enough, and it’s like they think we have never had any mental health issues ourselves or any experience with this. I’ve been teaching and doing pastoral support for students for about twenty years now, and I’m more than familiar with helping support students with serious mental health and pastoral issues. And this new culture isn’t like that at all. It’s something very different, and really concerning. I know I sound like I’m just complaining, but it’s dismaying to me that despite every effort to support students it’s like that’s actually counterproductive, and I think we should be changing tack on this soon before the culture gets even more entrenched. It isn’t doing this cohort any favours at all.

You should be cheering OP on. If there weren't so many students told that their perfectly normal and expected anxiety about exams and assignments were medical diagnoses, there would be a lot more help available for people who really needed it, like your child.

Being anxious is not the same thing as clinical anxiety. Getting upset about upsetting things is not clinical depression. We're at the point where normal human emotion is being pathologised and treated as a condition...we're supposed to get anxious and upset and afraid! It's normal human emotion.

The recent graduates I employ are just impossible, their own needs and feelings are all they care about and they are unwlling to put in any real effort.

I actually disagree that this generation faces a worse situation than any other and I'm not sure that the victim narrative is so helpful

World War 2?

Or Vietnam - in the US and Australia any young man over 18 could be called up and sent to fight ….

My dd does suffer from anxiety and was particularly bad before one assignment was due in, she wanted to defer it, precisely because “loads of people are”.

I persuaded her that nerves were just normal, that she’d still have to do it again and she’d suffered for most of the build up already, so that that would start again if she deferred the assignment. She did it, did well and was pleased she didn’t defer.

If she hadn’t been at home and speaking to me about it all, I’m sure she would have just deferred it as that was the easy option. I’m sure that many do, just as you say op.

I'd agree with this! As an example they have frequent graduate group meetings to practice presentation skills and discuss training / requirements for chartership qualifications etc, and it gets cancelled as much it takes place because they say they haven't had time to prepare their presentations 🙄
My favourite was "I can't go on that site visit because I'm on leave the day before".......but you're back at work that day so I don't care where you are the day before!

But she’s right. No generation HAS lived though anything remotely like this. I’m 44, I’m the sort of age of person that’s managing these people. I’VE never been through anything close. If you were just a little kid in 2008, (I wasn’t, but wasn’t really affected) then really I don’t think you can compare the impact on them as a cohort. I know the eighties were tough at times, and the seventies sucked, but I don’t remember them. Those issues did not affect absolutely everyone across a generation, either. They affected some areas and demographics more than others, and plenty of individuals (like me) were unaffected. No student was unaffected by covid. None. The effect of covid is much more blanket. And on a generation who haven’t grown up with the idea that it will be ok in the end. A generation that view Boomers especially (and to some extent Gen X) as the generation that wrecked the economy, the housing market and the planet, and then pulled the ladder up behind them. Who see corporate gain at the worker’s expense as the norm, not the first rung of the ladder that leads anywhere for them. Who know that the reward for digging holes is a bigger shovel and who constantly tell one another via an uncensored and decentralised always-on, almost universally-accessible medium that the only way to succeed is get off the ladder, anyway. We see all that, but it didn’t form our worldview on it. We grew up with a different one that we modified to keep up. That’s a massive difference.

People are constantly comparing covid to the war. To have even been born during it you’d need to be over 78. To have been an adult during it you’d need to be 96. I’m fairly sure than few of those people are still in the workforce, and as a generational voice they are now few in number. I don’t think it’s a helpful comparison usually, but I DO think it demonstrates universal impact, well. So no, no generation has lived through anything like this in living memory. I don’t think it’s fair to minimise that.

it's interesting that people are saying employers shouldn't make accomodations for neurodevelopmental conditions
or for mental health. If someone uses a wheelchair, we expect their employer to provide accomodations, so why is this different for conditions we can't see with our eyes? And I agree totally, if someone just can't do the job, that's a different matter. But helping them to be able to do the job to the best of the abilities, surely we're ok with that?

I do agree @Eeksteek and I personally think the general doom and gloom for the future (cost of living, climate change, unaffordable housing, insecure jobs etc) has far more impact than covid did really. I do feel for young people and I think having people, especially ‘boomers’ who are blamed whether fairly on unfairly on the massive disparity between the future for young people compared to their rather cushty lives, tell them they’re snowflakes etc doesn’t help.
For what it’s worth a lot of students are absolutely brilliant- I just don’t get to see a lot of them as the ones that take up 99% of my time are the ones struggling.

I am not saying employers should not make accommodations. I am saying the reality is often different from the ideal.
And you are sadly naive if you think employers always make good accommodations for people who use wheelchairs.
There is a reason disabled people are way less likely to be employed even if the disability does not affect someone's ability to work.
Lots of employers if they think lots of adjustments need to be made will simply not give you a job.

I think it’s not necessarily accurate to characterise the effects of the pandemic as MH issues. It’s lazy thinking which situâtes the problem within the individual. In truth what we have done is put young people into cold storage at a time when they are supposed to be having all sorts of formative experiences, building resilience, learning skills, developing neurologically. That’s got to have an effect! You’re expecting them to have developed normally in a grossly abnormal environment. That’s not a reasonable expectation.

I’m not arguing the endless coddling is the right approach btw. Better by far to get them back to meeting normal expectations asap

We’ve also all lived through it, though - and most of us had to work through it with little support. I didn’t have a good time. But I also accept that I had a far better time than friends who were working in the NHS (many of whom now have diagnosed PTSD), or in key worker jobs, or who were in financial difficulty. And anecdotally yes, but most of my students were not in fear for their lives from Covid, and were at home being looked after and getting bored. That’s all shit, yes. Unprecedented, yes. But mine were objectively not having a terrible time, just a mildly shit one; and yet you would think they had been on the frontline in Ukraine! (Again, I’m not talking about the ones with serious issues and hardship or diagnosed conditions here.)

Another issue — going into the third year now is also the cohort, of course, who didn’t take A-levels in 2020. Now, remember the huge media storm about how universities had to let in any students with offers, because of the grading problems with teacher-assessed grades being too harshly adjusted by the algorithm in some schools? But as we move through, it has become apparent that the grades were actually pretty accurate. Those who failed to meet the conditions, but who we accepted anyway, are doing markedly less well than the ones who did meet the conditions — all of the students in my lot who fit that profile have all got low 2:2s so far.

I find this pretty interesting, because it suggests that the algorithms weren’t that off after all; and public pressure put on govt and universities to accept anyway may well have been misplaced.

No-one’s saying that. They are saying that normal stress, or nerves, is not a mental health condition that needs to be accommodated.

Stress is a one of the things that helps us to achieve what we need to do. It’s normal, and useful.

Teaching people that their employer (or university) needs to make accommodations so that no feeling of stress or discomfort is ever felt is neither reasonable nor helpful.

As I wrote previously, there are likely to be times of extreme acute stress in my workplace, and having employees who believe that the response to that is to hide under the desk or go home is no use.

My husband tells the story of when he was a relatively junior trader in one of the major financial crises. His job was to make prices to clients in one specific product, and he was the only one in the bank trading that one.

He calculated prices based on where interest rate futures were trading, using a spreadsheet he’d had to build himself.

That day, when New York opened, every single price on the screen changed from a number to a word. “FAST.” That was it, no price information, and, of course, that’s when the phone lines exploded.

Careers and reputations were made and lost that day. People were in one of two camps. Some people stopped answering their phones, while others stood up, started clicking in to speak to clients and asking them “Good Afternoon, and what can I do for you today.”

I think at 44 you are the generation who have had it the easiest to be honest.

The bad stuff in the eighties did not affect everyone badly just as the current situation did not affect everyone badly. But if you watch Billy Elliott, or Rita, Sue and Bob too, many people left school into that kind of background. And no we did not think life would get better. The media were full of how our generation would have young people leaving school who would never have a job.

My aspirations and those of my peers were not about owning a house, but just about getting a proper job i.e. not YTS. Unemployment was massively high. I do not think young people understand what that means.

But what I have learned is that every generation has their challenges. But those who do best are those who look for opportunities and build a good life. And we are going through a second industrial revolution with robotics and AI, there are lots of opportunities.

No one has said that, at all, so its not at all interesting

And employers should not make adjustments for normal levels of stress and anxiety.
I had an important meeting yesterday that I was very anxious about. My anxiety made me prepare properly when I had very little time to do so and made me perform better in answering questions. I think we are going to win the business.

Some stress and anxiety is normal and actually good for you.

this was the quote:

"I also think people talking about employers needing to make "accomodations" to help people isn't actually helping. Sometimes you do just need to do the job as requested or find a new job"

So yes, not directly saying that people with poor mental health shouldn't have accommodations, but not far off!

I agree. My DS has really struggled due to Covid and the appalling way his Uni have reacted to it. There was basically pretty much zero support during the lockdowns - lots of "don't hesitate to contact us" emails, but when he tried, there was bugger all help available, and mostly he couldn't even get a phone appointment with anyone, let alone a face to face. The Uni staff simply weren't on campus for months on end - whole departmental buildings locked and in darkness. The best he got was email replies, typically 2/3 weeks after he sent the email. It's ruined his Uni experience. Luckily he DOES have resilience and determination and basically got himself through it, no extensions asked for, all work handed in on time, generally good results (mid 70% on average across all modules), but he's certainly not a happy chappy about the whole sorry experience. He also knows loads of fellow students who've dropped out, attempted suicide, etc due to the lack of support! Unis need to continue to provide as much support as possible as there are still students who are really struggling through no fault of their own. It's alright Uni staff saying they've provided support, but academic staff really don't know how much, if any, pastoral support has been given by the other departments - they may assume that there's been plenty of support available, but in my DS's case, what the Uni said and what they actually did in terms of support were very different!

That would really annoy me.
We all have our own problems at home, and sometimes we might talk to our colleagues about them. But it is inappropriate to use a manager for personal support. It as if they have never learned to be an adult.

But it depends what accommodations employers are being asked to make. Sometimes they will be helpful at other times they will not.