Recovering Not Condemned: The Lived Experience of Baccalaureate Nursing Students with Mental Health Concerns

Abstract

Mental illness affects one in five Canadians and this number is higher among post-secondary students (Canadian Mental Health Association, 2012). Over the last three decades, studies have sought to determine how many students have mental health concerns in hope of substantiating the need for more support and funding for mental health services on campus. Knowledge gained from these studies is often seeped in a bio-medical perspective of mental health and illness, where the students’ mental health concerns are problematized and the target of psy interventions. What is lacking is an understanding of the university students’ lived experience, a person-centered understanding that sheds light on what supports or threatens students’ mental well-being while illuminating the socio, political and economic realities that may be at play in the lived experience of students with mental health concerns. This research project has addressed this gap by using interpretative phenomenological analysis to explore the lived experience of baccalaureate nursing students in the university and critically appraise their understanding of their lived experience. This research concludes that the rising rates of mental health concerns are the distillate of the psy complex and the by-product of student stress within the university and not merely a problem inherent to a student as the psy complex purports. This new knowledge may serve as a foundation for, meaningful mental health services on campus and, the development of nursing curricula that is sensitive to the lived experience of nursing students with mental health concerns, one that fosters mental well-being and recovery.