Tag: ANXIETY

Learning Courage: On the Unexpected Benefits of Examining My Anxiety by Alex Mendelsohn

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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. 

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Coping With Anxiety and Grief: Accepting Help and Moving Forward by Gurnoor Mutreja

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I am a law teacher and postgraduate in law who has lived her life according to a plan. I can say with pride that I have been academically very competent throughout my life. I passed all exams with flying colours and therefore I assumed that I would easily land a job. However, the Covid pandemic and changes in my personal life made it hard for me to secure a job. 

In this blog, I will discuss my journey through depression and anxiety and how these affected my professional life.  I will also discuss how accepting the problem and seeking helped me find a way forward. 

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Challenges of Navigating a PhD while Recovering from Mental Health Conditions by Daeun Jung

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I was first diagnosed with depression and generalised anxiety disorder ten years ago. My first reaction to getting the diagnosis was relief. I was relieved that my problems were medically recognised. I was not just “weak” or “lazy” or “attention-seeking”; I felt validated. Then I felt angry. Why did I have to seek validation through a medical diagnosis? Since then, I have been on three different antidepressants, been hospitalised a few times, and gained some scars along the way. At the same time, I have finished my bachelor’s and master’s degrees and worked in four different jobs, which led to last year when I started my PhD programme and joined the world of academia. In this blog post, I will share my experiences of navigating the first year of PhD while managing mental health conditions.

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The perfect researcher (and why I am not it) by Zoë Ayres

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Just another typical PhD day for me. Highlighting another research paper, trying desperately to retain the salient bits. Mixing it up with different coloured highlighters. Grabbing a cup of coffee, hoping that the information might go in if I let the caffeine sink in. And yet it never quite does. I beat myself up, telling myself I am too stupid to do a PhD. Walking away from a meeting, I feel ashamed, as I know I read the paper that was being discussed, I just can’t quite recall the details. Rinse and repeat. This, combined with many other small things, which in isolation were hardly something to fret about, left my mental health in tatters.

It’s not just a bad day, or a bad week. It’s all the time. I am struggling to engage in reading papers. As soon as I pick them up, I glaze over or I get distracted. My reading list grows forever longer – the weight of it playing on the back of my mind. My inner voice constantly telling me I am not doing enough to succeed.

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Living with Anxiety in Academia: The Importance of Acceptance and Support by Carla Aranda

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When you feel death getting closer, you inevitably reminisce about your life: your best experiences; your worst moments; the things you said you were going to do but, in the end, didn’t; the things you did not expect to happen, but did. And if you contemplate on these things a bit, you will likely come to the same conclusion I reach: our life is ruled by the values we hold, which help to determine our priorities and the choices we make. For example, going to that concert instead of studying for a math test, attending that family gathering or staying home, and even bigger things like moving abroad alone or staying in your country of origin with your romantic partner. Priorities dictate our experiences, and if you don’t have much time left, you will most likely think of those hours you wasted on allegedly important (but truly irrelevant) matters.

In this blog, I will discuss my experience as an undergraduate student suffering from anxiety and how the current educational system’s flaws affect many students’ mental health and self-worth. Additionally, I will stress the importance and impact of having – and being part of – a supportive, non-stigmatizing environment, as well as share my ongoing recovery journey and what has been helpful during it.

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Writing, Compulsivity and Valuing Time by Kirsty Alexander

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Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn’t matter.

Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones 

One of the hallmarks of being a scholar is the ability to communicate through writing and usually to communicate research and teaching ideas through writing. Most people who go through doctoral training are aware that to be employable and to maintain employment contracts in academia, writing and publishing are desirable. Most are aware of the expectation that we should publish our doctoral research in some form during or after the PhD years. I completed my PhD in 2010 and I’ve yet to publish research from it. I write ‘yet’ because I’ve been invited to submit a chapter based on it for an edited collection this summer. I have a quiet confidence I’ll write, edit and submit. The details of this matter. In this blog I will share insights about how severe anxiety and compulsivity affected me and my writing throughout my PhD (and afterwards), and how I’ve managed to arrive at a place of gratitude and acceptance.

 

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A PhD, BPD & Me by Emma Corbin

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When I originally set out to write this blog, I was going to tell a beautiful story of a PhD student who struggled at first and rose to greatness. That wouldn’t have been truthful, because mental health recovery isn’t linear. It is a wild rollercoaster ride. So, here is the brutally honest story of my PhD so far. 

Everything was going pretty well for quite a while. It was the most at peace I had been with myself for a long time. That is, until I tested positive for COVID-19 in October 2020. Spoiler alert: I still haven’t recovered. After my 2-week isolation time, I returned to work. Despite colleagues telling me to take it easy, I jumped straight back in. Classic academia: presenteeism at its finest. The pressure I felt from losing all that lab time in 2020 was weighing on me, so I just pushed on through. Well, instead of recovering I got worse. It was miserable. Every experiment physically hurt. I was running myself into the ground. Publish or perish is not meant to be taken literally… right?

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Managing Isolation as a Field Biologist by Partha Sarathi

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Growing up, I moved around places because of my father’s job and I never found a sense of belonging with any one place. Losing connections with friends every time was painful and it has always been difficult for me to let go. Knowing that I would inevitably move again and knowing that I would have to let people go again, I kept on making more friends. However, it wasn’t until I experienced an unspeakable tragedy when I lost friends and someone special to a terrorist attack that my first experience with depression occurred. At the time I had no idea that I was even suffering from a mental illness. Things changed in that moment for me forever. According to my therapist, I have never been able to completely recover from that tragedy in 2008.

The reason I started with that paragraph instead of directly jumping into a discussion of academia is for everyone to know that academia did not triggermy mental illness; I had experienced it before following a tragedy. We are human beings, and we bring previous life experiences with us to our academic studies. However, there are certainly elements of academia that affected my mental health, including the narrative that sometimes we can only be academics and cannot have lives outside of our work. I hope that sharing my story here will help others to feel less alone.

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Trying to be Superwoman by Hannah Roberts

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When I was eight years old, I begged my Mum and Dad for a science kit for my birthday, shortly followed by a telescope and all the ‘how my body works’ books. After career day, I came home and announced, “I’m going to be a doctor.” I didn’t have the vocab back them for “making a difference – helping others.” There was also a status attached to wanting to be a doctor and naturally my parents reaffirmed my decision.

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The Gremlin and the Superpower: How OCD has Shaped my Academic Journey by Simon Fox

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 It wasn’t until a friend died that I suddenly realised time was precious. Through the grief, a transformative experience occurred within me. In my mid-thirties, I flung myself back into education at undergraduate level to pursue a new career in healthcare. I relished every opportunity and for the first time in my life, I felt that I had direction. More than that, I had a purpose. 

However, I was acutely aware that there was still something missing. I knew that deep within me, there was a piece of the jigsaw in my psyche that didn’t quite make sense. The more I looked for it, the more it would hide, like trying to remember a dream when you wake. There were vivid flashes, but it quickly slipped away. That was until my undergraduate final examinations. 

If you had asked me then, I would have said everything was fine. My grades were great, I had made friends on my course, and yes, that purpose in life that had been missing before was now burning brightly. That was when things began to happen that I couldn’t explain. There were missed instructions for assignments, despite my diligent attention. Conversations began to play on a constant loop in my mind. I would show up for seminars early and I couldn’t understand why no one else was quite as eager as me. Yet, I was going to the gym more than ever and I was on the verge of an exciting new career. How could anything be wrong with me?

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