Exploring Undergraduate Engineering Students' Definitions of Mental Health

This full research paper describes undergraduate students' definitions of mental health in order to advance understanding about what the term ‘mental health’ means to undergraduate engineering students. Recent studies have called attention to the worsening mental health amongst college students, particularly engineering students. Studies have connected these worsening mental health conditions to the high-stress culture of engineering. However, most research approaches mental health from its clinical definition, most often using established instruments to look for stress, anxiety, and depression among undergraduate students. At the same time, ‘mental health’ has been increasingly used colloquially by students in less clinical ways. In order to gain qualitatively rich understandings of how engineering students' mental health is impacted by the culture of undergraduate engineering, we must understand what students mean when they say, ‘mental health.’ This paper draws on a larger research study that interviewed 21 undergraduate engineering students about their mental health and experiences in engineering. Participants are from one comprehensive, research-intensive university in the Midwest, and all participants hold at least one identity that has been historically marginalized in engineering (e.g., gender, race, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation). This paper focuses on students' answers to the interview question: “How do you define mental health? What does mental health mean to you?” We pose the research question: How do undergraduate engineering students define mental health? We draw on Braun & Clarke's (2022) reflexive thematic analysis to generate themes that describe students' definitions of mental health. The results of this work are expected to add to the ongoing conversation about the mental health of undergraduate engineering students. Moreover, this work will open new avenues for qualitatively exploring the mental health of undergraduate engineering students from a more holistic lens, which will add to ongoing research that adopts a clinical lens.