Many graduate students oversee undergraduate students in TA, supervisory, or research assistant positions, interact with many graduate student peers, and can experience distress or mental health difficulties themselves during graduate school. The intent of this program is to help graduate students build their mental health literacy, that is their knowledge, skills, attitudes and confidence, to support themselves and other students in distress and difficulty and to build more inclusive and mental health-positive learning and teaching environments at McMaster.

This current graduate program has been developed and tested over 2 years in a pilot project. Dr. Catharine Munn and an occupational therapist have developed the content with input from students, faculty and staff; they and other trained healthcare professionals will be leading the workshops.

We have evaluated this program and our faculty and staff program in depth, with consideration for improved knowledge, skills and confidence, satisfaction, impact and safety. Please contact us if you’d like more information on this process or results, which have very high satisfaction rates!

Additionally, McMaster School of Graduate Studies (SGS) is supportive of this program and has contributed to its development and promotion.

While having some shared content, this is distinct from the TA training that we developed and you may be aware of, an optional online module (with no workshops) that can be selected by TAs within their 5 hours of compensated training offered each semester.