Challenging the Culture of Stress: Evaluating a Brief, Theory-Driven Mental Health Help-Seeking Intervention for Undergraduate Engineering Students

Engineering undergraduate students report high levels of mental health distress yet exhibit comparatively low rates of engagement with professional mental health services compared to students in other academic majors. These low help-seeking behaviors may be further compounded by the prevailing “culture of stress” within engineering, which emphasizes self-reliance, stoicism, and academic rigor. Therefore, this study examines the impact of a brief, 15-minute mental health and help-seeking training tailored for engineering students at a large Southeastern U.S. university. Grounded in the Integrated Behavioral Model of Mental Health Help Seeking (IBM-HS), the study evaluates whether the training influenced mental health help-seeking perceptions, including key determinants (e.g., mental health perceptions, knowledge, and skills), beliefs (e.g., prioritizing academics over mental health needs) and mechanisms (e.g., attitude, perceived norm, personal agency) that shape intentions to seek professional support. The study compares training and non-training groups from Fall 2023 ( n  = 431) and Fall 2024 cohorts ( n  = 132) using pre/post survey responses. Findings indicate statistically significant improvements in both perceived and objective knowledge of mental health resources, while help-seeking beliefs, mechanisms, and overall intention did not change significantly. Discussion of our results includes the training’s advantages (e.g., low-cost, scalable, and designed to be embedded into existing engineering curricula) and considerations for future research and practices. Overall, our findings highlight the potential for brief, discipline-specific interventions to improve mental health literacy in engineering education while underscoring the need for complementary approaches to shift deeper help-seeking attitudes and norms.