“The Grind Never Stops” Mental Health and Expectations of Productivity in the North American University
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using a critical phenomenology approach, I explore how the neoliberal social context of the North American university produces normative expectations which both interact with and pattern student experiences and understandings of mental health struggles in this environment. The data I analyze comes from semi-structured interviews with 24 university students between 18 and 24 years of age who self-identify as experiencing mental health struggles, as well as participant observation at university wellness events. In this context, both students and the university understand wellness as the ability to maintain constant academic productivity. While university wellness programming promotes goal-oriented individualized “self”-care as the gold standard for attaining and maintaining wellness, students often view self-care activities as unproductive, instead prioritizing academic productivity over subjective well-being in striving to maintain an image as the “good” student. I argue that understanding mental health in this way both causes and exacerbates harm, introducing the conceptual contrast between “Student Wellness”—academic success—and “Human Wellness”—subjective well- being—as a means of understanding how university attempts to increase wellness often support neoliberal agendas to the detriment of their students’ well-being.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".