Breaking the silence: A feminist call to action

Mental health and wellness are issues of growing concern on campuses across North America. While feminist geographers have done important work over the years to organize, mentor, gather, and publish collectively on issues related to wellness, much more remains to be done. In this article, we—a collection of scholars who identify as feminist geographers—comment on our experiences of mental wellness in the academy, and engage in a collective self-analysis to better understand the silences, invisibilities, and hesitancies surrounding these issues on the campuses where we work. We argue that not only does more attention need to be brought to bear on this topic, but also that it needs to be more broadly understood. We find that there are institutional, cultural, political, and intersectional factors that impede active engagement with mental health and wellness in the academy, and we discuss strategies for deeper engagement with such important issues for our students, colleagues, research participants, and ourselves.