Toxic Professors, and How to Cope with Them by Anonymous

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I am a Psychology graduate from India. I am writing this blog to talk about who I describe as the malevolent lords of academia – toxic professors, and how to cope with them.

In my opinion, succeeding in academia is difficult with the cut-throat competition and the discrimination against candidates from marginalized communities, even without toxic professors and lab members. 

My expectations of academia were low based on the experiences of previous students, especially those with disabilities and/or Asian students, who had often faced accessibility issues and racism in being selected for research labs, conference travel grants, etc. 

However, I, unfortunately, encountered toxic professors. With these incidents, my respect for academia sadly plummeted, which I didn’t even know was possible because it was already at rock bottom.     

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Moving From Healthcare to Academia: Strategies to Support Mental Health by Safiya Robinson  

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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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Grad School Journaling Prompts: Better Understanding Your Emotional Academic Journey by Jordan A. McCray

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Making the decision to leave grad school might have been the hardest thing I have ever done. Graduate students are frequently told that ruminations on leaving are normal, and that wanting to quit constantly is a rite of passage. However, the thought of leaving is framed as a common daydream that gets us through to the next break rather than a legitimate alternative to powering through constant suffering. Constant commiseration is an understandable coping mechanism in fostering understanding in academic communities. It also begs the question: How do you know if it’s really time to leave? How do you discern between “relatable” misery and the need to take action for your own health and wellbeing? 

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Addiction and the University by Wendy Dossett

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TW: Sexual assault, suicide (ideation and attempt), addiction, alcohol and other drugs.  

In my final undergraduate year, an acquaintance who was seeking support for addiction issues told me she’d been advised by a recovery mentor to ditch her ambitions and not apply to go to university. ‘First things first,’ she had said. ‘My recovery is more important.’

I was stunned.

At that point in my life, more than three decades ago now, my own addiction problems were beginning to take hold. However, it would be more than ten years before I would acknowledge that. I had, at that time, little understanding of addiction, and no understanding at all of recovery. I considered the advice my friend had received to be utterly outrageous. Surely, a university education should be available to anyone in possession of the admission requirements! I objected, viscerally, to this person being figured as ‘too fragile’ for education. I considered the aspiration for education to be, not only a good, but a right. My own university education meant the absolute world to me. How dare some ‘non-university-educated’ person, (I assumed, on no basis at whatsoever), limit my friend’s reasonable ambition!

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My Thesis Experience: From Crisis to Transformation by Nicci Attfield

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I am a South African writer with a background in psychology and critical diversity studies. In 2014 I began to assist James Reed with his practice-based research project Agents of Change (which was created with Shelley Sacks from the SSRU at Oxford Brooke’s University). Agents of Change helps to connect people to their thoughts and feelings about climate change. Participants spoke about the fashion industry as well as the losses of plants and animals and even the losses of ancestors due to colonialism. How to live a sustainable life appeared to be elusive to many participants. All expressed a deep grief at the devastating impacts of environmental destruction. Many also expressed shame at living lives which impacted on other people.

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Everyday Memoirs of a Graduate Student in Zimbabwe by Oswell Moyo 

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The deadline for my next manuscript is approaching and corrections have arrived needing urgent attention, and yet I am seated on top of an old single bed engulfed by darkness. Again. my laptop, which has earned names like “fridge” and “desktop” from friends and classmates, is useless when there is a power outage. My city is yet again experiencing a power cut, with it not being unusual for them to occur for a period of 10 to 16 hours a day. Alternative sources of power such as generators are heavily regulated and are only switched on for a few hours a day. And when they are switched on, using that time is dedicated to the necessities: cooking, eating and bathing. Study has to take the back seat, but then I’m reminded of impending deadlines, and that I have to get my work done. I am then filled with the anxiety of, “What can I do?” or “Where should I start?” knowing that my laptop will only fail me again tomorrow. 

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The Impact of Hustle Culture in Academia on Disabled Students by Nikita Ghodke

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From my experience in academia for a couple of years now, the pursuit of academic excellence, inclusivity, and diversity has not been a top priority in many academic spaces, at least the ones I have been a part of. What happens when academia is ruled by the popular and well-known phenomenon of hustle culture instead? Well, the publish-or-perish mentality thrives, the pressure to be constantly “on” is always there. This pressure can continue to build up,  leading to troubling concerns like imposter syndrome. Here’s my story, as a full-time burnt-out disabled student in academia from India, having navigated life with arthritis (and the chronic pain associated with it), as well as Borderline Personality Disorder for many years.

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Supporting Those Supporting Student Mental Health by Anonymous

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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.

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Moving Away from Perfectionism by Ashleigh Johnstone

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The American Psychological Association define perfectionism as ‘the tendency to demand of others or of oneself an extremely high or even flawless level of performance, in excess of what is required by the situation’. If you take a look at my school reports from when I was a child, you’ll likely notice a common theme. Time and time again, my conscientiousness and perfectionism were highlighted as commendable traits – in fact, it’s hard to look through my reports and not find the word ‘conscientious’ repeated throughout. The standards I set myself were always much higher than those that I expected of others, I was not happy with ‘good enough’, I wanted to excel. Rightly or wrongly we often get pigeonholed as a certain ‘type’ of student at school. I was a ‘good’ kid, always polite, hardworking, and reliably consistent. When you hear these things often enough, you start to take it in as your own identity. 

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Rediscovering Me: My Journey to Adult ADHD Diagnosis by Zoë Ayres

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TW suicide

I don’t think I have ever written from a place of genuine anger before. But I am full of rage. Not the sort of anger that causes you to lash out, that strikes a blow, but the type that quietly simmers and boils until you can no longer ignore it, because if you do, it’ll bubble over and hurt you and everyone else in close proximity. But this is where being diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) at the age of 31 leaves me. An angry person: angry at society, angry at medical misogyny, but mostly angry that it took me so long to get here.

But here I am, nonetheless.

For those of you that don’t know me, my name is Zoë. I have lived with ADHD for 32 years. I have lived with ADHD, knowingly, for just six months. Suspected? Around 2 years. Externally, I am “highly successful” (someone else’s words, not mine). Internally I’ve gone through periods of self-loathing so intense I wanted to die. I didn’t believe I belonged in academia (or the world for that matter) and struggled to understand why. This is perhaps why I am so very angry: if things had panned out slightly differently, would I be here writing this blog at all?  

But here I am, nonetheless.

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