Self-analysis of mental exhaustion caused by teaching in private higher education

revisiting social determination to understand health

Abstract

This study presents the general lines of a self-analysis of the relationship between mental exhaustion and teaching work in a private higher education institution (HEI), covering a period of four years, from August 2020 to July 2024, during which I worked as a professor in the Psychology course at one of these institutions. The HEI in question emerged in the city of São Paulo from a school founded by teachers in the 1960s. The institution became a college in the following decade, in the wake of the great stimulus to private higher education given by the corporate-military dictatorship, and a university in the 1990s, when there was a second wave of expansion of private education through neoliberal policies. In the 2000s, with the entry of large investment funds into the private education market, the educational group entered into partnerships with international companies and funds to obtain foreign capital for new acquisitions. Since 2007, the group has acquired 12 other HEIs and created a distance learning centre with more than 1,200 centres across the country. In 2021, the group made its first initial public offering on the São Paulo stock exchange, adhering to the corporate governance policies required for this. It is in this context of organisational changes aimed at intensifying the value creation process that I was hired as a lecturer in the Psychology course at the IES in 2020. That year, 3,052 employees were dismissed from the group and only 1,298 new hires were made. Along with this downsizing, there was a process of salary reduction: colleagues dismissed from the Psychology course in the previous semester received between 2 and 3 times more per hour/class than the amount they would receive. In addition, the HEI reduced the number of credits for courses, and therefore the number of hours per shift; migrated courses from face-to-face to distance learning; and increased the number of students per classroom (class size). Intense exhaustion characterised my work from the first weeks on the job, from the high demands imposed during synchronous remote teaching due to Covid-19 pandemic restrictions, to the many hours of unpaid work between classes to prepare materials and correct assessments, to the availability to handle student demands inside and outside the virtual classrooms. With the resumption of face-to-face activities, other excessive burdens began to take their toll: commuting between the five campuses of the higher education institution in the city of São Paulo where the psychology course was offered; insufficient sleep to repair the body, as I worked morning and night shifts; the scheduling, now experienced in loco; the lack of equipment in classrooms; the inability to carry out extension projects; the absence of remuneration for research guidance, career planning, and support for teacher training. My work experience at the institution in question is marked by the feeling that each semester was worse than the previous one, in a progressive deterioration not only of the working relationship, but also, more importantly, of the ability to train high-quality psychologists. This fundamental meaning of the existence of a psychology course, and the purpose for which I built my career as a psychologist, teacher, and researcher, was daily undermined, amputated, or even impeded in the face of the demands for intensified capital accumulation that guided the policies of the HEI. With each passing period, under the imposed organisational changes, the realisation that education was a marginal goal at the institution became more evident, and the impossibility of avoiding more acute changes, with greater repercussions on functional and financial life, even with requests for support from the union, led to a deep sense of hopelessness. The grouping and approximation of the students' life stories intensified the suffering caused by the impossibility of understanding the pedagogical demands of each one and proposing learning strategies tailored to each person/group. The training model imposed the adoption of a content-based approach geared towards the acquisition of technical skills, even though institutional discourse occasionally affirmed the need for critical analysis skills. The result for my health, the subject of this analysis, was a process of intensified suffering, irritability, anxiety attacks, and a weakening of my professional identity as a teacher, which led me to resign in July 2024, both to pursue a postdoctoral internship and to distance myself from that work environment. The proposed study is based on the framework of Latin American Social Medicine to identify the relationship between the production process and health-illness, using the concepts of workload and burnout, and knowledge of Work-Related Mental Health to address the levels of the process of determining mental burnout, using the biographical method in Work Psychopathology to highlight the relationship between the meaning attributed to work and the subjective transformations experienced by the worker. In the face of a declared mental health crisis in the world of work, the proposal aims to reaffirm the importance and radical nature of Marxist precepts for understanding the ways in which working people live, become ill and die, and for transforming this reality.