Mental Health in Nursing Education: Creating a Supportive Environment for Faculty and Students

Mental health is a critical part of our overall health that is often neglected by health care professionals, whether in academia or practice. Health care workers in the United States require engagement in demanding and sometimes unsafe responsibilities, including exposure to infectious diseases and, more recently, violence from patients and their families. Most health care workers do not seek professional mental health support because of time, lack of financial resources, or the sense that they should be able to manage their mental health needs on their own (Bergman Stubin et al., 2024). Evidence indicates student burnout affects overall academic success, attrition, and clinical performance (Wei et al., 2021). Nurse educators are also at high risk of experiencing emotional exhaustion and burnout due largely to exposure to unhealthy work environments in both clinical and didactic settings (Dugger, 2024). Growing workload demands of nursing faculty result in high levels of stress and a loss of work-life balance. This compounded stress frequently leads educators to consider leaving the workforce, intensifying the shortage of nurse educators and, therefore, our capacity to increase the growing need for graduates prepared to practice. As educators, we must promote effective mechanisms that support mental well-being and psychological safety among nurses and nursing students in all roles. Integrating strategies to support students' mental health, promote self-care, and build resilience has the potential to enhance a student's ability to manage current stress, improve academic and clinical success, and strengthen the capacity to address future stressors in the workplace (Stubin et al., 2024). Studying academic stress factors associated with mental health disorders could provide us with valuable information to mitigate strain on students throughout nursing education (Reverté-Villarroya et al., 2021). Nurse educators, too, must be encouraged to develop strategies that decrease their own levels of stress and burnout. As educators, we must promote effective mechanisms that support mental well-being and psychological safety among nurses and nursing students in all roles. Integrating strategies to support students' mental health, promote self-care, and build resilience has the potential to enhance a student's ability to manage current stress, improve academic and clinical success, and strengthen the capacity to address future stressors in the workplace. Strengthening the health care workforce is a goal we must commit to, whether in preparing the next generation of nurses or in the ways we teach and role model healthy physical and mental behaviors. The health of the nation depends upon the well-being of our workforce. This issue, replete with research that explores mental health issues in nursing education and strategies to mitigate this stress, will help guide all of us in creating an environment that supports the learner, the educator, and, in the long term, our practice.