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.
Read More »Supporting Those Supporting Student Mental Health by Anonymous
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.
Read More »Moving Away from Perfectionism by Ashleigh Johnstone
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.
Read More »Rediscovering Me: My Journey to Adult ADHD Diagnosis by Zoë Ayres
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.
Read More »Sexual Harassment: A Corrosive Disease by Anonymous
TW: Suicidal ideation
I am in my mentor’s office on a cold, rainy Friday afternoon before the holiday break. Tears are pouring down my face. I am unable to think straight and cannot tell right from wrong. A chill runs down my spine and I realise it has become impossible to do research. I am overwhelmed with dread at the thought of spending another year in my thesis lab, and writing a dissertation feels unimaginable. I feel trapped, isolated, and unwelcome, and suicidal thoughts have crept into my head. Over time, I have lost my purpose and wanted to quit science. I hit rock bottom. Sexual harassment has taken a heavy toll on me.
Read More »Thriving in Graduate School with a Mental Illness by Ashley Ransom
The words “thriving” and “mental illness” are not usually associated, but mental illness is not an inevitable barrier to academic success. As a postdoctoral fellow with bipolar disorder, I am intimately familiar with the challenge of completing a Ph.D. while living with a mental health disability.
Read More »In Conflict – The Impact of War on Social Scientists by Kacper Rekawek
“It was a Thursday, 24 February 2022. I got up and saw what was happening and that was it. For the next 72 hours, I would not sleep, I did not even attempt to. I worked the phones, the app messengers, the computer, everything. There were too many things to document, too many videos to watch, too many people to save. Only after these three days, sometime on Sunday, was I able to actually refocus on something more mundane such as lunch or dinner. It was brutal and tragic, but I could see things were not going their way. They blew it.”
The above quote is from a colleague of mine, an academic who researches what can euphemistically be called “Russia studies.” The event he described in a conversation to me a few weeks later over an overpriced draft beer in Oslo, Norway, was the Russian invasion of Ukraine. “They” is a reference to the seemingly unstoppably advancing Russian army.
I am a post-doctoral research fellow at the Center for Study of Extremism, C-Rex, at the University of Oslo. I study the issue of (far right) individuals who go and fight in foreign wars and are not motivated by financial gains to do so. Russo-Ukrainian war is my case study; since 2014, both sides have attracted some foreign fighters in general and also far-right fighters in particular. I am originally from Poland, although I have lived and worked in the UK, Slovakia and now Norway and held a string of positions not only in academia but also think tanks and the third sector. Since 2015, however, I have consistently published on the aforementioned issue, with my recently published book a seeming crowning achievement of a long-term research focus.
Interestingly, until 2022 the war, waged by two neighbours of my native Poland, did not really affect me emotionally. Maybe it was my naivety, or maybe the fact that Russia was dressing it up as “civil war,” “war in Ukraine” and waged what was dubbed a “hybrid” conflict, or war short of war, and as such I was able to detach myself from the atrocities. It seemed far away from me, as Donetsk, the conflict’s epicenter, is hundreds of miles to the East of Poland and after February 2015, and the so-called Minsk II Agreements, casualties were relatively light. In effect, this was becoming a classic “frozen conflict” which would remain unresolved for years (if not decades) to come.
All of this changed in February 2022 when my Ukrainian friends found themselves sitting in basements while under Russian bombardment, while others frantically tried to enlist in the country’s armed forces or were sending their families Westwards to Poland so they could be spared the horrors of war. No longer was I a semi-detached observer of this war—but I only realized this months later.
Read More »The Glorification of Overwork in Academia and its Impacts on our Collective Wellbeing by Jenna Mittelmeier
Wellbeing is something that I have had a complicated relationship with throughout my life, although perhaps without always having the vocabulary to label it. This became most salient during the second year of my PhD, when it felt like a blackout curtain suddenly dropped and the world became, quietly and without fanfare, simply a different place. It took me the better part of a decade to recognize this, though.
Read More »Learning Courage: On the Unexpected Benefits of Examining My Anxiety by Alex Mendelsohn
Most of the stories I read about mental illness portray it as this hellish, horrendous thing that you must wait out. While in the darkest throes of mine, I have found it difficult to read these stories. If my experience was entirely a waste, how could I find the motivation to keep going?
I have found that the prevalent feeling during my illness has indeed been of time wasted. However, I think there are significant benefits if remission is found through medical treatment. I realised that the strategies I learned in order to stay alive, whilst should not be needed as medical intervention should be accessible and a first port of call, may be truly useful to others.
Read More »My Mental Health Journey: Reflections from India by Ritika Mahajan
India stands fourth in the number of PhDs awarded annually. According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Report, 27000 candidates completed a PhD in India in 2017. This number is equal to 10 per cent of the total PhDs across G20 nations. Between 2011 and 2017, PhD enrollments in the country jumped by 50 per cent, and articles were written about the mad rush to attend university. In particular, the authors of these articles raised concerns about research relevance, quality, authenticity and originality.
Recently, mental health issues also attracted attention when authors of a study conducted among PhD students in two Indian public universities reported that 70 per cent of respondents suffered mild to severe depressive disorders. The cases were severe among students of economically weaker sections, those who earned less than 250 dollars a month or were less proficient in English. Despite this, the mental health of PhD students in India is still a stigmatized issue, where many deny that there is a problem. In my opinion, this is why those of us that feel able to speak out must do so. In this blog, I share insights into the challenges I have faced both at the start of my journey into academia and now as I begin to supervise students. I hope this is of some value to PhDs and new academics in India and beyond.
Voices of Academia 