PGR Mental Health and Well-Being
Information about PGR mental health and well-being
Student Mental Health First Aiders
The Informatics Graduate School is committed to creating and maintaining a culture of positive mental health and wellbeing throughout our PGR community. The school has recently invested some student development funds to train 11 of our PGR students to become mental health first aiders. These 11 students gave up their own time to complete this training and the school are very grateful they did. Along with the existing staff mental health first aiders, PGR tutors and supervisors we hope we are building a network of support through the school our PGR students can rely on.
The students who completed this training are spread across our CDTs and various institutes so hopefully there will always be someone you can reach out to, either directly or via the general email contact address: infpgrmentalhealthfa@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk
Student Mental Health First Aiders:
Adarsh Prabhakaran AIAI PhD
Filippo Ferrari ANC PhD
Sigrid Hellan Data Science CDT
Kaan Öcal Data Science CDT
Tianyang Liu ILCC PhD
Lorenzo Martinico LFCS PhD
Eric Munday LFCS PhD
Agostina Calabrese Natural Language Processing CDT
Verna Dankers Natural Language Processing CDT
Ionela Mocanu Pervasive Parallelism CDT
Isobel Voysey Robotics and Autonomous Systems CDT
Several staff memebers in the school of informatics have also complted the MHFA training and are also free to help if you want to get in touch. You can find their inforamtion here.
In November 2020 IGS ran an online event in conjunction with the EUSA Mental Health and Wellbeing team, titled: Wellbeing and Scientific Excellence which you can view here.
Other Resources and Contacts
Postgraduate students: The Wellbeing Thesis
The Wellbeing Thesis is an online resource for postgraduate research students, supporting their wellbeing, learning and research. The site includes research, top tips, videos and downloadable action plans. The resources are designed to support through every stage of the postgraduate research student journey, so whether at the beginning, middle or end of your research, there will be something here for you.
Student Councelling Service
The Student Counselling Service have lots of advice on managing stress and anxiety online and they are continuing to operate a service during the Coronavirus pandemic. they can be contacted by email or via their website.
Accessibility
Inclusivity
Spirituality
For everyone
University Chaplaincy
The University Chaplaincy welcomes students and staff of all faiths and none, providing a wide range of support and resources to help with worries and concerns. We have highlighted a select few of their many resources which we think will be most useful, but you can head to their website to see their full programme.
Chaplaincy Listening Service
The Chaplaincy runs a daily listening service during the week (Mon -Fri) where staff and students alike can get in touch to share their worries and concerns, and be listened to in confidence and without judgement. The Service offers appointments between 9:00 and 17:00 on weekdays, which can be booked via email, and the service aso offers 24/7 support for urgent issues. Support is available in person, by phone, by email or video conversation, offering easily accessible support across the University community.
Drop-in Mindfulness sessions with the Mindfulness Chaplain
The Chaplaincy's Mindfulness Chaplain, Kitty Wheater, offers lunchtime online drop-in mindfulness sessions on Tuesdays and Fridays. Kitty also circulates a weeky email on a mindfulness topic every week, called The MindLetter, which provides a welcome pause for breath amongst the many work emails. Go tot he MIndfulness sections of the Chaplaincy website to find more information and resources for Mindfulness practice.
For Times Like These Blog
When the pandemic hit the UK in March the Chaplaincy started a new blog entitled 'For Times Like These', offering a space for people to share their emotions, experiences and connect with each other despite being physically distant. The posts are written by the various Chaplains and so range from more spiritual to secular, but all are thought-provoking in the way they tackle our current feeling of uncertainty.