Contextualizing Mental Health Support in Engineering Education: Evaluating a Brief Classroom-Based Presentation

In higher education, there is growing recognition that mental health support should be responsive to students’ lived experiences, educational contexts, and disciplinary norms. For instance, engineering students report high levels of distress and underutilize professional mental health services when compared to students in other disciplines, reflecting a culture that normalizes excessive workload, self-reliance, and academic rigor. Therefore, this case study examined the impact of a 15-min contextualized, classroom-based mental health presentation tailored to undergraduate engineering students at a large Southeastern U.S. university. Grounded in the Integrated Behavioral Model of Mental Health Help-Seeking, the presentation integrated findings from the literature on engineering culture and its influence on student well-being. Across two years, the presentation was delivered to nearly 4500 engineering students, reaching an average of 82% of enrolled engineering students. The study evaluated this impact by comparing presentation and non-presentation groups among students who completed surveys in Spring 2023 (n = 431) and Spring 2024 (n = 132). The presentation group showed significant improvements in perceived and objective knowledge of mental health and help-seeking resources, whereas help-seeking beliefs, mechanisms, and intention did not significantly change, likely due to the deeply culturally ingrained nature of these constructs. These findings underscore the value of contextualized approaches to mental health promotion and provide support for scalable, classroom-embedded presentations and other interventions within engineering education and higher education more broadly.