Machailla McCabe

Current Research Masters Student

Exploring definitions of Mental Health & Establishing Validated Assessment Tools amongst Student Populations within the 3rd Level Setting.

This research project will act as baseline for establishing students’ views of what they perceive mental health to mean to them. It will also identify potential supports and challenges students face in relation to their mental health by placing their ‘voice’ as a central focus in this ‘student-centred’ critical participatory action research (CPAR) project. The project also envisages to generate appropriate data collection tools on both mental health perceptions and for conducting situational analysis of mental health across the three CUA sites on an annual basis within GMIT, LYIT & ITS. The research design focuses strongly around the recently published National Student Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Framework (2020).

Bio

Registered health promotion practitioner with the Association of Health Promotion Ireland (AHPI) and the International Union for Health Promotion and Education (IUHPE). Throughout opportunities provided by my undergraduate degrees where I completed a research internship with the Integrated Care Programme for Older Persons (ICPOP) project and volunteered with ITSSU Welfare committee where the primary focus was implementing mental health campaigns such as; the USI welfare campaign of the year (2020) called ‘Lifting the Silence’. I soon realised my interests lie within the field of health and wellbeing with an emphasis on mental health and health/sports psychology in particular. Thus, it was a natural progression to seek an opportunity to combine both personal and academic interests.