This week’s Engage session met to discuss pandemic fatigue among students, faculty and staff.
Merry Brown, lecturer of Philosophy, served as the mediator. Other panelists included Denise Britt, lecturer of Psychology; Anthony Prewitt, interim Director of Multicultural Affairs; and John’Na Webster, health and wellness educator with Student Health and Counseling Services.
The first speaker of the session was Dr. Denise Connel, Professor of Psychology. Connel opened the session by explaining what exactly pandemic fatigue is.
“Pandemic fatigue is actually a decreasing compliance with middle mitigation recommendations like mask wearing, social distancing, isolating, handwashing, and other behaviors,” Connel said.
She questioned if pandemic fatigue actually exists, or if it is just a psychological construct that is not founded on any real information and is just based on observation. For example, if we see others having fun and doing something against compliance, we might base our decision to comply or not to comply on the actions we observe others taking. Even with this influential way of perceiving things, statistics for the past year show that the majority of people chose to comply with the mandates and guidance for maintaining good health. She also discussed how our individual motivations affect our compliance. If we see that our compliance is benefiting our health and helping to prevent others from getting sick, we are more likely to continue our compliance. In addition to this, the effort required to complete a task will affect our decision to carry it out.
“When the value of not engaging in mitigation behaviors outweighs the value in doing so compliance is predictably low,” Connel said.
She went on to discuss several other factors that affect compliance.
- The need for positive reinforcement following our actions
- The need for guidelines to be more specific and less vague
- Having to multitask while at home
- Lacking resources to make compliance easier
Prewitt then spoke on the mental health of students and the effect their mental health can have, which can contribute to pandemic fatigue. He also discussed the heavy impact the pandemic had on incoming freshman who experienced their first year of college without any hands-on work, which he said must have been a challenge for them all. Because of all the changes that the pandemic has forced on students, they have adapted to a new normal that is hard to break away from. This, Prewitt said, can cause more stress on a students mental health because they have to readjust to a different normal, despite the measures the UTM is taking to make campus feel a little more normal.
“And I think on our end, we’ve been kind of trying to counteract that and say ‘Hey we still have some resources here that are available to assist you’ but some just don’t know and because some have kind of isolated themselves or pulled back, some aren’t willing to utilize those resources,” Prewitt said.
Webster then drove the discussion to the topic of student’s resilience. She opened by bringing up the concerns some people were having regarding student’s ability to cope with the changes that would be made to comply with COVID guidelines. She spoke about the skills the pandemic have forced students to learn, including resilience and adaptability.
“You’ve also been learning to adapt, and you’ve been learning to adjust. We’ve been learning to avoid some things…If I just shift my focus and I begin to think, like, I’ve seen strengths that I didn’t think I had,” said Webster.
The panel was then opened up to students to discuss what is has been like to be a student during a pandemic.
Mason Rhodes, junior Civil Engineering major, discussed how the pandemic did not really affect his experience because smaller class sizes allowed him to still attend in-person classes.
“I have been fortunate enough to have this experience, so I don’t know if I’m like the ideal student to have an average perspective, because I feel like I’ve been pretty lucky and haven’t experienced too much of this pandemic fatigue,” Rhodes said.
On the other hand, students like Janika Smith had a difficult time handling the changes that the pandemic forced them to deal with. She said that she had a difficult time dealing with online classes, maintaining focus while doing assignments at home, and getting assignments done.
The discussion then shifted to how the faculty has been affected by the pandemic. Prewitt said that faculty is also experiencing pandemic fatigue, and that he believes that faculty has adapted and grown more resilient as a result of the pandemic.
The last Engage Session of the semester will be April 23, and the topic will be “Environmental Health Check.”
