Beyond The Self: The Entangled Nature of Mental Health Self-Care in Higher Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Amid growing rates of poor mental health in Canadian higher education, many university students turn to self-care. This ethnographic study explores how self-care is mobilized by university students as they face inadequate mental health resources that do not attend to their lived realities of distress. Using ethnographic fieldwork, in depth interviewing, and artistic mapmaking, I discuss students’ self-care practices in three standalone papers. The first paper explores how students engage the imagination to create speculative spaces of healing through fantasy and play. Their imaginings reveal new social dimensions of self-care as embodied and communal, where make-believe alternatives that heal social ills for others also heal the self. The second paper overviews how histories of self-care in activist, medical, and popular spaces have resulted in a new genre of self-care that is focused on restfulness. Yet, in the context of the neoliberal university, rest and relaxation are made impossible in ways that inculcate bodily, emotional, and social harm and exhaustion. The final paper considers how students navigate many different formal and informal therapeutic spaces as they journey through treatment and care. Institutional and self-administered configurations of psychological care create unexpected openings and closures for emotional healing. Taken together, the dissertation elucidates how young adults absorb their social worlds to generate possibilities and constraints in caring for the self and others. A focus on self-care helps to expose the systemic influences on distress and redress that can be overlooked in professional treatment modalities. Self-care is a social practice, and it is precisely this solidarity through caring that can lead to improved mental health. This dissertation makes contributions to incipient anthropological discussions on care, cure, imaginings, and the entangled nature of our wellbeing.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".