Going online – Psychological support is also needed

Many universities pledged to begin officially teaching online on 4 May. Many are currently assessing the availability of ‘physical’ resources like laptops, data, etc to ensure their students’ preparedness to participate in online teaching and learning. However, lack of resources for online teaching is not the only thing challenging students and academics: the higher education sector needs to pay attention to the mental or psychological wellbeing of staff and students as well.

Our main concern in this article is the need for universities to consider, and equally prioritise, the psychological preparedness and general mental state of the students and staff. Little attention, if any, is given to the wellbeing of academics in some universities. The human resources departments must now assume their 21st century mandate: to focus on the mental health of workers.

In respect of student wellbeing, the higher education sector and universities must now make good use of their counselling centres and students affairs divisions. While the work on finding resources for students must continue, we argue that the counselling centres and student affairs divisions must embark on the training of their often-limited staff to prepare them for online methods of counselling and therapy.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shaken all of us. The higher education sector seems to be the one sector that is yet to reflect on the psychological impact of the pandemic on both staff and students. Experts, including the Minister of Higher Education, Dr Blade Nzimande, has repeatedly made reference to the question of economic inequalities in South Africa as one of the major challenges for universities to move to online teaching and learning.

Yes, students need the necessary resources to allow them to participate in online teaching, but the biggest challenge we are yet to confront is more mental and psychological. The importance of state of mind of students (and staff) cannot be downplayed in this uncertain time.

For students preparing for an adjustment to online and remote learning is not easy, especially, mentally. The usual, everyday rituals like going to the gym, visiting friends, chatting and smoking, and drinking with friends are not possible. As mundane as this might sound, humans attach value to these things, and at times, these activities help them to recoup and continue with life commitments such as studying, teaching, researching, or formal work in general.

The mind is everything

The times have changed and our minds cannot always adjust so easily to these changes, especially when considering how quickly the pandemic has developed, without giving the necessary time to adjust our minds to the changes. The mind is everything, especially in these times.

The mind has always been the fixation of intellectuals concerned with understanding human behaviour. Those who have taken a psychological approach to study the mind and human behaviour like the American philosopher and psychologist William James who wrote The Principles of Psychology, viewed psychology as the science of mental life, “both of its phenomena and of their conditions”.

Psychology believes that the mind is responsible for human behaviour and human thought. Whether conscious or unconscious, the mind interprets the world and reacts to it with the kind of behaviour that human beings exhibit in their everyday lives. When presented with something like the current health pandemic, the human psyche has the potential to lose balance and react with the primitive mind, as manifested by fear, anxiety and stress.

Research has shown that different threats push different psychological buttons. Viruses like Ebola or avian flu heighten anxiety levels more than familiar threats.

Mental resilience

More than anything, we need to focus on building mental toughness and resilience. Human resource departments as well as counselling and student centres need to find ways and means to deal with the new normal, and help staff and students adjust to these times. These units need to be innovative and create methods that are considerate of the limited access of many students to online services.

Central to this must be an approach that will strive to ensure that everyone is mentally prepared to accept the changes happening around them. These changes might be permanent. We might not go back to normal (whatever that normal was). Instead, it might be necessary to focus on a new way of being.

How we make it out of this will be determined by how mentally prepared we are, not so much by how many material resources we have. Of course, the latter is important – we obviously need resources – but these will be meaningless to students or workers who are mentally strained and who cannot go back to work if their minds are not prepared to accept what they see.

We need to toughen up in order to be able to accept ‘online’ as the new order of teaching, research and communication. The quicker we adjust to this new form, the better it might be for our wellbeing. It will have to cease being a ‘thing of the Global North’. The situation is unlikely to change and this we must accept.

For students and staff, the following guidance may be of assistance:

• Go back to waking up at your usual time before the lockdown.

• Create some kind of gym at home.

• Find something to do at home, in the house, in the yard.

• Try to use your time the way you were using it before the lockdown, and make sure that you can account, before you close your eyes at night, for what you managed to do on a given day.

• Help as much as you can at home.

Basically, wake up and do something! This is not a joke; you are not dreaming. This is your reality now, and possibly forever. You shall be enrolled as a student online for many years to come. For academics, it will soon be a major requirement to illustrate competencies in digital teaching. There is no turning back or away from this reality.

All this requires mental preparedness. We might as well embrace the change and find ways of working within it. The services of psychologists at this time are critical, and for universities in South Africa this is the time for the counselling centres and student affairs units to take a leading and active role in preparing people for online teaching and learning.

Sandiso Bazana is a lecturer and researcher in organisational psychology at Rhodes University, South Africa; Sandisiwe Nabo Bazana has a master of arts in psychology and is currently studying for a master of arts in counselling psychology at Rhodes University.