In this blog I’m going to share with you some tales of my experiences with student mental health and welfare in academia. I’m a newly independent researcher at a large institution in the UK. I’ve had almost a decade of experience supervising all kinds of students, mostly undergraduates but a few masters and PhDs, but recently more of them have been turning up with mental health issues. For anyone who suffers from anxiety or depression, I’m going to pre-warn you I will probably get things wrong, but I will do my best.

My Experience as a Supervisor

The tale starts with an extremely anxious student. This student began their project well. They turned up and were enthusiastic and intelligent, and they were a genuine pleasure to have in the lab. I try and aim for a supervisorial style that is involved at the beginning but gradually becomes more ‘hands-off but available’. The student ran through experimental plans with me and a colleague, was doing well and experiments were happening. They were even beginning to have some ideas about things they could look at. 

But as term progressed, they became more and more distant. The student started showing up only well into the afternoon and working well past midnight. As anyone who works in a lab knows, if you’re a beginner you can’t really be working in a lab when nobody else is there. For anyone who doesn’t work in a lab, there are a lot of machines that are easily made unhappy. Incubators (ovens) run out of gas or water, water baths (for warming things up slowly) need topping up or cleaning. But beyond that, there’s the obvious reason that if something breaks, there’s nobody around to ask for help. And of course, this is exactly what happened. The incubator water alarm went off at 1am and my colleague and I received panicked messages. The student didn’t know how to stop the alarm and did the exact opposite of what was needed. It wasn’t a devastating error but it would have been an easy fix if it had happened during the day when one of us was there. ‘Oh, you just do this’ we could have said. As it was, hours of panic ensued as the student worried about what they might have broken because the alarm wasn’t stopping. 

I responded to the panicked messages the next morning with calming words of ‘Don’t worry, these things happen, it won’t have done anything major to the cells, this is what you do next time it happens’ and left it there. But the midnight messages kept appearing. There were no major problems or broken equipment but small queries came through regularly, which could have been responded to quickly if we’d been in the same room. But my alarm goes off at 5.30am, so there’s no way I was going to be up at midnight. I responded and gently encouraged them to perhaps try and come in during the day so that we could all work together. 

And then as the weeks ticked past, the late arrivals turned into total absences. They went AWOL. No response to email and no response to WhatsApp – my preferred method of student communication. 

At this point, I can feel you judging me for revealing all these details about a student. Not very politically correct at all. But what I want you to realise is that I was treating the student, in the first instance, in exactly the same way I treat all my students. I’ve never had bad feedback; students often bring me chocolates or cake after they finish or when they get their results, which I always think is a good sign. I try and approach them all as individuals; some require a lot of handling and prodding and micromanaging, and some require almost nothing and are happy to just come to me with questions. I am, in short, quite an involved supervisor. I want them to enjoy the project and I want to get the best out of them.

And by highlighting that, what I’m hoping to also make clear is that I was absolutely unprepared for this student. I’ve had stressed students before, I’ve had miserable students before, but they were always temporary periods of high stress which a bit of tea, cake and chat always seemed to help with. What I had this time was a student struggling with mental illness and the University had provided me with zero training about how to help them. The student had disclosed at the start of the project that they may have undiagnosed ADHD (attention deficit/hyperactive disorder) and that they had taken time off previously for mental illness but they hoped that both were under control. And to me, with no training and very little experience, they seemed perfectly in control and cheerful most of the time.

At this point, I really just didn’t know what to do. I did not know whether I should be getting in regular contact, because coaxing them out of their abyss would help, or whether that would just feel like additional pressure and make things worse. I approached colleagues who I knew had suffered and asked them, and I even accidentally made one colleague cry by asking her about her experiences. I was absolutely and utterly at sea with no clue what to do.

What this has resulted in for me is an immense amount of my own anxiety, brought on by obviously taking all of this too much to heart. The student was clearly unwell and that was not my fault, but what if I made it worse? What if, by acting – or even not acting – in the way I did made the whole situation much more volatile? I take some comfort in the fact that if this student had gone to someone much more senior in the University they basically would have been abandoned to their fate. Instead, I tried to keep in regular contact without placing them under pressure. I would send an email occasionally to say hi and ask if everything was OK, or to ask for some trivial bit of information that it wouldn’t be arduous for them to provide. I found their college liaison and kept in regular contact with them, if I was genuinely troubled (absolutely no contact via any means for over a week) I would let them know. I was trying to be both supportive and cover my own back.

In my unpreparedness, I found Zoe Ayres’ book on Managing Your Mental Health During Your PhD. I had a good flick through and sent it through to the student, recommending they read it. I recommended it to college because this coincided with me being approached by another student who was so stressed they wanted to quit. And I recommended it because I had been given no training on how to deal with neurodivergent and anxious students. 

I’ve since done a lot of reading around the subject. In my opinion,  what this particular student needed, and I later found out that they were starting to receive, was proper professional help. But if they hadn’t sought it out on their own, I would not have known who to put them in contact with. I would have started at a local level, asking around college and the University, but it still would have been in a more general way, not in a direct and presumptive, ‘OK, I know you’re having these problems so you should go and see this person’ kind of way.

But my other stressed student who approached me wanting to quit clearly was under a lot of pressure but you could see that they were doing their best to control the situation and were very much asking for help. In that case, my job was to listen. Again, I had been given no training on how to deal with stressed, crying students who just wanted to go home because their boss was overworking them. But I am a human and apparently, that’s relatively rare in academia, and even more so at the University I work at. So, I listened and asked what they wanted to do. They wanted to carry on but not under the current circumstances so together we sat and made a plan. I made sure they were happy with the plan and comfortable with what they needed to do.

Suggestions for Change: Starting Conversations

At the moment in academia I believe we get a lot of random ‘come and be mindful’ sessions but not a lot of ‘what to do if someone is sobbing in your office’ sessions. What I would have really benefited from would have been some kind of advice early on about warning signs to look out for. I studied some of the mechanisms of mental illness as part of my PhD so I’m well aware of the stigma around it but I’m also well aware that it is a disease like cancer. For cancer we’re told to keep an eye on our bodies, told to watch out for changes in our weight or what our skin looks like. For mental health issues, there should be similar signs that we can look out for in ourselves, but also that we can look out for in others. Changes in sleeping or eating patterns, social withdrawal, etc. I know about these things because it was part of what I studied. But if I were a physicist, would I know to check up on a student who was looking tired all the time or would I just assume it was term time and they were busy? (No offense meant to any physicists reading!)

Since all of this began I’ve found mental health first aid courses are offered by my institution, but I have to go and find them and they’re two days long. I don’t want to say I’m too busy to do this, that would be wrong, but I have a lot on my own plate and taking two days out is a real challenge. But it’s not even that, it’s the fact that I had to get so stressed and anxious and worried that I had to seek out this information myself. I didn’t start teaching and on day one someone said ‘By the way, sometimes we get students with these problems, here’s some things to look out for in this leaflet’. I started teaching because I thought it would be good for me and I assumed the students would be keen, happy and interested. Instead they are often stressed, scared and depressed and there is no quick fix for that but also no quick information provided for those of us in charge of the students. 

The trouble with being even vaguely interested in the welfare of other humans is that if lots of people sob in your office you do start to wonder if it’s you, and feel a little sad that you have no-ones office to sob in. But the reality is that it’s very unlikely to be you. So to start, the best thing to do is just to have a conversation with the sobbing person. Are they struggling with the work? Is there a way you can adjust their workload or the way they work? Are they having problems at home you don’t know about? Can you suggest they take some time off? Do you know where the local counselling services are so they might have someone impartial to talk to? If it’s more serious, can you suggest they see their GP or a local University nurse if there’s one with good mental health training? Sometimes all they need to do is tell you that it’s all very overwhelming, they don’t need you to problem solve, so you just need to sit and absorb it and provide tea and cake.

But absorbing it all is still going to be difficult for you so remember to take care of your own wellbeing as well. Take some time out and be mindful. Eat some cake and find someone else you can vent to who has no skin in the game. Remember, the world is full of problems but if you’re finding your own ones overwhelming then you’re not going to be able to help anyone else. Ultimately just be patient. Be patient and kind, with yourself and with everyone else.  

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