A couple of weeks ago, Kylie, one of my doctoral students, defended her PhD. At Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, this is usually called an “oral defence”, but it’s also sometimes referred to as a “viva voce” (living voice), or “viva” for short. The doctoral candidate sits down with the experts who have read their thesis and discusses it with them.
Not at all stressful, after spending at least three years of your life summarising your research in not-more-than-100,000 words (most of the PhDs I’ve supervised have been 60-70,000 words). Kylie did spectacularly well, gaining the coveted “only typos to be fixed” outcome and, boom, she made those fixes and fired it off to the library after a couple of days. Ironically, it’s the library that has the final say on whether you get to graduate with your Masters or doctorate.
At Victoria University, a doctoral thesis is examined by three people; an internal examiner, a national examiner from another uni in New Zealand, and an international examiner who is an expert in the topic and tasked with benchmarking the thesis against international expectations. For this examination, the international examiner was Frank Deane.
Deane completed his masters thesis and clinical training at Massey University, went to the United States for a stint, then returned to work at Massey until the late 1990s. Since then, he’s been at the University of Wollongong amassing more than 500 articles, book chapters, and other academic outputs. This is a prolific record. No wonder he’s a “senior” professor …
Incidentally, Deane is the only person I’ve ever seen present a conference paper about amateur taxidermy. Those slides have stuck with me …
Deane’s most significant work has been around help-seeking: why, how, and for what do young people seek help? More importantly, why do young people who would benefit from help for mental distress, often not seek it?
This research identifies a number of barriers to help-seeking that are useful for people who work to support youth to know about. They include personal and social factors. Social factors might be things like the stigma associated with mental health issues.
In Aotearoa, there’s been a rather dramatic improvement in people’s willingness to talk about mental health, but stigma is still a significant issue. This includes the negative beliefs that “people” have about mental health that can be internalised by people who experience distress – they may feel ashamed for being distressed. Public stigma also plays out in discrimination against people struggling with their mental health.
The most common forms of discrimination here come from friends and family, but more than a third of people experiencing mental distress report being discriminated against by potential employers, and even mental health services. Personal barriers may include an underdeveloped emotional skills toolkit – if you’re not good at dealing with your emotions, and don’t know how best to get help, then of course you will struggle to find help.
With his colleagues, Deane has also focused a lot on what’s called the “help negation effect” – the paradoxical effect that people who most need help demonstrate less inclination to seek it. Again, public attitudes towards mental distress and help-seeking appear to play a role.
If you believe asking for help means you’re weak, or you worry you’ll be misunderstood or not believed, why would you ask for help? But mental distress also affects how we think about the likelihood or hope for feeling better, and this gets stronger as people become more distressed. It’s well known that depression, for example, can create the sense that help is futile, and also reduce the get-up-and-go needed to get out there and ask for help. This is a perfect storm. It also emphasises the importance of reaching out if someone you know is distressed, and maybe not able to ask for help.
