Tag: BORDERLINE PERSONALITY DISORDER

Completing a PhD whilst Getting Diagnosed with a Serious Mental Illness by Jack Birch

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TW: Suicidal ideation

Completing a PhD is often a time of academic and personal discovery. In spending so much time thinking about your subject, it seems only natural that people think about who they are as a person and if this has changed over time. 

What did this look like for me? 

Well, there’s things like my accent changing, and feeling a loss of ‘who am I?’. This was a natural occurrence during my PhD due to living in a different region, but in my earlier university education, I’d deliberately softened my accent due to being made to feel like an outsider. There’s also new cultures, hobbies, foods, and music that I’ve had the privilege of exploring and enjoying. But the biggest thing I look back on is that, whilst completing my PhD, I was also going through the process of having been diagnosed with – and subsequently managing – a serious mental illness. 

I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder halfway through my PhD. It’s an illness that has a wide range of symptoms and presentations. For me, it presents as extremely intense emotions and frequent suicidal thoughts and ideation, which is quite a lot to deal with alongside doing a PhD! With the huge benefit of hindsight, in this blog I’ll reflect on how the stages of me being diagnosed with, and managing, a serious mental illness interacted with completing a PhD. 

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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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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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