Incorporated: Student Mental Health Discourse and Higher Education in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“Student mental health” has recently emerged as a pervasive discourse on Canadian postsecondary campuses, characterized by non-profit organizations’ expanding role in defining and managing students’ mental health, students’ active participation in shaping and perpetuating discourses of distress and wellbeing, and institutions’ promises to build thriving communities. Prior to 2011, students’ psychological wellbeing received little concerted attention, but a number of student suicides propelled the topic onto the national stage. Although media coverage framed the problem in part as the crisis of a generation struggling to succeed in an inhospitable, overly demanding education system, the postsecondary sector embraced the language of “student mental health” and quickly transformed it into an institutional branding strategy. I address this seeming contradiction by considering the cultural, political, and economic work that student mental health discourse does to benefit the institution of postsecondary education. Influenced by the theoretical perspectives of Nikolas Rose and by cultural studies methodologies, I map the shifting discursive terrain of student mental health discourse, focusing on three main figures: the student in distress, the campus community charged with identifying and responding to that student, and the student mental health leader. I examine documentary evidence including institutional reports, strategic plans, mental health models, organization websites, media reports, press releases, and student mental health campaign materials. I articulate these with public displays of student mental health promotion, through which students perform their understandings of distress as signs of biomedical problems and of mental health as something “we all have.” My findings reveal that acknowledging student distress has become integral to Canadian postsecondary education’s corporatization process. Such acknowledgement prompts the emergence of a “caring community” that operates in the interest and image of the corporate world, melding the values and goals of the postsecondary sector’s market logic with the hopeful acts of the students who seek out the validation, warmth, and professional potential offered by this extracurricular education. I argue that student mental health discourse both draws in and retains willing student participants, thus intervening in postsecondary corporatization’s potential depletion of one of its greatest resources: human capital in the form of the student body.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.031 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".