Appendix A7: Mental Health For the Engineering Student
by Olivier Cleynen
The fact that many key figures of thermodynamics have had tragic lives makes good material for (dark) jokes in class. Sadi Carnot died of cholera aged 36. Boltzmann hanged himself, Lavoisier was decapitated, von Mayer was forcibly detained in an asylum, and Rudolf Diesel drowned in the British Channel. “And now let’s see what chapter 7 is all about, you’re going to see it’s a boatload of fun!” The last time I joked about this with someone, I jested that I should add an appendix about mental health at the end of the thermodynamics textbook I wrote.
It took a minute and then something in my mind listened seriously. The thought popped: why not, actually, add an appendix about mental health in an academic, technical textbook? After all, a lot of help is provided just in the outreach itself, in normalizing that it’s okay to think about well-being.
My experience is that engineering universities foster a culture of powering through mental health issues, instead of learning to engage with them. I had some bad experiences as a student and some horrible ones as a teacher: seeing depression, mental collapse, sheer desperation, suicide up close. We, I, just powered on.
Years later I would arrive as a beginner high school teacher at the Stiftungsgymnasium in Magdeburg. After my very first class, the students left, and my principal stood up from the back of the classroom. The first thing he said was: “how do you feel?”. It was a question teachers would ask often, and I asked and answered it many times in the two years I spent there.
Yet before that, not once in five years studying engineering, not once in my thirteen years of teaching engineering students, had these words been uttered around me at work. Once you internalize that mental health does not belong, you stop growing and learning. One of my students shot themselves with a gun. How do you think a French classe prépa deals with this? Class starts at 08:00 the next morning. We, I, just powered on.
Now, having worked two years with the best team in the world and the most awesome students ever, I know better. Engaging with feelings makes you better at everything, a better human, a better scientist and engineer certainly. I wrote the appendix with great ease. It’s nothing remarkable, as it should be. Here’s to the one person, just one would be enough, that it might reach one day: gotcha, you matter and you rock. Appendix A7: Mental Health for the Engineering Student, in Engineering Thermodynamics, a free textbook, 2025 international edition in SI Units.