DEVELOPMENT OF STUDENT HEALTH MANAGEMENT – THE UNIVERSITY AS A SETTING FOR MENTAL HEALTH LITERACY PROMOTION

The general state of health of students deteriorated significantly between 2015 and 2023.Due to the extensive change processes in the German higher education system, e.g., the Bologna reform, but also internationalization and digitalization processes, the perception of complexity and stress as well as emotional exhaustion among students have increased significantly.This is reflected in a significant increase in mental illness.The contribution presents the university's project "Mindful Campus" (MinCa), which aims to promote mental health literacy (MHL) among students of the vocational teaching profession and to establish student health management (SHM) at the university.At the beginning of MinCa, the overarching question is how organizational university structures can contribute to supporting the individual learning of MHL and enabling the integration of health literacy promotion into the curricula in order to establish an SHM at the university, analogous to existing occupational health management.In the long term, the project aims to expand the current internal structures beyond the institutes and central university facilities involved in health promotion.In order to enable a sustainable continuation of the pedagogical content to promote students' MHL, MinCa aims to expand curricularly defined modules in the medium and long term.This is linked to the objective of a permanently embedded micro degree in MHL across degree courses.A micro degree is composed of several micro credentials, which are smaller learning units that can be taken flexibly and are designed to be competence-oriented.In addition to strengthening students' individual MHL, it is also necessary for universities as educational institutions to become aware of their responsibility for the development of a health-promoting environment, to recognize the effects of crises and disadvantages within their organizational structures and to take them into account by designing their university culture in a correspondingly responsive manner.As a result, universities increasingly see themselves as actors in health promotion and anchor the associated values in their self-image, e.g. in the form of an SHM.The aim of the SHM is to create a health-promoting university environment for all students and to systematically implement and sustainably integrate it into the university structures.This contribution therefore examines the question how supporting the individual development of mental health of students can contribute to developing a participatory approach to enable the integration of MHL into the curricula in order to establish a sustainable SHM.