I recently began a career in academia, after spending over 20 years in clinical practice as a dentist. While I still practice a few days a month, the bulk of my time is spent teaching dental students who are about to start their journey into a clinical career. I was drawn to academia through my love for teaching – something that I had done in various roles throughout my clinical career – and an interest in discovering more about the practice of research. 

On one of my earliest days at the university, I walked into the kitchen on our floor to make myself a cup of coffee and saw printed and stuck to the notice board several memes warning staff to look after their mental health. I found this interesting, and slightly alarming – what had I gotten myself into? Having just left a career that has a track record of poor mental health and burnout, I was surprised to find similar complaints in academia. However, conversations with my line manager and other staff confirmed to me that academia can be a place where burnout and poor mental health can be an issue and I needed to find a way to make sure that I took care of my own mental health. 

As my first year progressed, I began to observe a number of similarities between academia and clinical practice, and places where mental health could be impacted. I also began to think about the strategies I had used over the years in clinical practice to protect my own mental health, and I gave serious consideration to how I could put those strategies into use in my academic career.

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