Tag: CHRONIC ILLNESS

Living with Chronic Illness in Academia: How MS Transformed My Understanding of Relationships and Support by Ronan Carbery

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Multiple sclerosis (MS) entered my life in 2013 with my wife’s diagnosis. We spent time learning to manage the condition and moved to another city to be able to draw on family support while understanding the nature of the disease. This learning curve steepened dramatically when cancer complicated her condition in 2015, leading to two years of treatment that pushed MS management into the background. When she achieved remission, we thought we’d found our new normal.

In 2023, ten years after her diagnosis, I learned I had MS too. I went from being a supportive partner to someone living with the condition myself. The medical reality was compounded by the psychological weight of uncertainty about career sustainability and whether I could maintain the professional identity I had spent years building. The persistent worry was whether disclosing this would mark me as damaged goods, potentially derailing any chance of promotion or career advancement.  This has prompted two years of reflection on my part on how chronic illness changes not just what we do as academics, but how we relate to the colleagues who make that work possible.

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Hidden Health Crisis: Navigating Early Menopause, Chronic Illness, and Precarious Academia by Dr. Aikaterini (Katrina) Tavoulari

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Chronic health conditions, fertility struggles, and the precarity of academic life shape the lives of countless academics, yet these truths often remain unspoken in professional spaces. I was preparing to defend my PhD when my body quietly, irrevocably, rewrote the script of my future without consent or asking permission.

The floral dress I chose for that appointment, a cheerful yellow dotted with tiny daisies, hung perfectly as I sat across from doctor. They delivered news that forced me to rethink every assumption I had carried for over thirty years, back when I was still in my thirties, long before I crossed into my forties. Premature ovarian failure syndrome. The clinical terms couldn’t soften the reality: my body was moving into menopause decades ahead of schedule, taking with it the easy assumption that I had time to figure out motherhood later, after I finished my viva, after I started my postdoc, after I finally found a permanent position.

What followed wasn’t just a health crisis; it was a collision between the relentless demands of academic life and the sudden fragility of my own body. This is the story of how I learned that survival in academia isn’t just about publishing papers and securing funding; sometimes it’s about learning to live authentically in a world that rewards high performance above all else.

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Navigating the Labyrinth: On Chronic Illness, Graduate School, and Finding Wholeness by Laura Dickey

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Working towards your PhD while grappling with chronic mental and physical health conditions… well, sucks. Graduate school is often depicted as a training ground for intellectual growth, a hallmark of academic rigor providing access to a playground of ivory towers. For many, it’s a demanding but ultimately rewarding journey. However, for those of us navigating graduate school while grappling with chronic health conditions, the experience can be a labyrinth of unexpectedly demanding challenges. 

My own journey as a PhD student in Philosophy has been profoundly shaped by my experiences with Bipolar Type II Disorder and chronic pain. While graduate school has tested my resilience, it has also given me a new perspective on community, self-worth and the journey of coping in the face of adversity. This post explores how these experiences have influenced my academic development, pushing me to redefine success in my own terms. Ultimately, I hope to share a lesson that has been critical to my journey: authentic participation in community can create profound feelings of wholeness and belonging, providing an anchor for stability amidst the demands of academic life.

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The Mask by Anonymous

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I am a flawed, ambitious, and entirely ordinary human who wears a mask daily at work. 

I put the mask on as I get into my car to drive to work or social engagements, and I take it off as I walk through the front door of my home. It is not a deliberate costume that I don and remove, akin to a Jane Austen period drama. Instead, it is a learned psychological survival mechanism that I have been employing for as long as I can remember, to the extent that I have lost track of when it is on, its appearance, or its functionality. It has become an integral part of my being. 

I am neurodivergent, I have Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and I have a life-limiting, incurable autoimmune illness. Very few people know this because I wear a mask of a neurotypical, mentally and physically healthy person. 

And it’s exhausting. 

The mask saps my energy, my spirit, my cognitive processing ability. 

Unlike the notion of “I need a nap,” which may seem relatively manageable, the exhaustion experienced when one has depleted all cognitive space to engage in conversations with one’s spouse and child at the end of the day feels more profound. In this blog I’ll talk about my experiences living with these illnesses and their impact on my life and career to date.

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‘Honey, I shrunk the postgraduate kids!’ – Disability, Precarity, and Support in Academia by Athanasia Francis

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 TW: Suicide ideation, Images of hair loss, Images of medication

Collecting my hair falling in batches around me was something I slowly came to accept as a daily ritual, as was the case with the dozens of pills when I could afford the prescriptions.  I have been suffering from a chronic neurological condition and its fluctuations are debilitating, even when I look ‘fine’ on the outside. Some of the ways I experience my condition include muscle fatigue, joints locking suddenly, lack of coordination, memory gaps, week-long migraines while constantly in pain, disorientation and brain fog; in short, a body on permanent false alarm mode and attacking itself. 

I’ve been also severely depressed with relapses since my early twenties in a constant post-traumatic downward spiral, which coincided with twelve years in academia. Eventually, it became difficult to tell which condition was triggering the other. My mental state and physicality were tangled into a messy knot that was at times too unbearable to break through. I had come to the brink of quitting many times, quitting whatever career ahead, quitting my PhD, quitting any remaining faith and effort, quitting life. 

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Mental Health and Irritable Bowel Syndrome by Anonymous

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I’ve been working in Higher Education as a lecturer for 13 years now, and have thoroughly enjoyed every part of my journey from class teacher, to senior lecturer and senior fellow of the HEA. My love of mathematics, and researching the effectiveness of how mathematics was being taught in secondary schools, made me question how much of an impact I could make as a classroom teacher or as a Head of Department, and so when the opportunity arose I decided to move into teacher education and training. 

I have suffered from Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS-D) for just over 10 years now, which is a condition that affects the digestive system, causing stomach cramps, bloating, diarrhoea (IBS-D) and constipation (IBS-C). Despite this being a lifelong condition there is no cure and the exact cause of IBS is still unknown (https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/irritable-bowel-syndrome-ibs/). The two main triggers of IBS are food and stress, and for me the trigger was being trapped in a failing marriage with an abusive partner, and then moving abroad where things only became worse.

Nine months after the move abroad, I managed to return home, and thankfully had started working again as a university lecturer so found some solace in that. However, trying to keep my marriage from falling apart, and being in denial about the situation I had ended up in, took its toll on my health and my symptoms worsened. Foods had started to became triggers too, and I decided it was time to consult with my GP and find out what was going on, who immediately referred me to a specialist as my quality of life had deteriorated significantly.

As time went on I learnt what my trigger foods were, and managed to reduce the frequency of my IBS-D symptoms, I had separated and subsequently divorced by then too, and I finally felt in control of myself and my life again.

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Coping with a Chronic illness during a PhD by Lieselot Nguyen

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I am 2 years and 11 months into my 4-year PhD. I was once told that a PhD could feel like running an obstacle course of a marathon distance, but I could say the same of figuring out and managing a chronic illness. It turns out I have had to do both in parallel. I had been experiencing health issues for 3 years before the symptoms worsened during the 2nd year of my PhD. This still impacts my life and ability to work today. In this post I will explain how I have tackled the challenges brought about by my health issues in relation to my studies. 

Image credit: @PhDCartoon
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The Pain of Pursuing a PhD as a Young-Old Adult by Elizabeth Harris

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I’ve always known I wanted to help people, to understand their “whys” in an effort to better understand them. So, naturally a career in psychology was the perfect fit. Yet I had no desire to become a psychologist and wasn’t aware of any other available avenues to realising my goal until I found neuropsychology and neuroscience; since then, I’ve never looked back. Except I didn’t happen upon this career path until I was in my thirties. I didn’t find the career that fit without going through a number of jobs that didn’t fit. So, here I am starting a PhD in my mid-thirties. Inevitably asking myself if I made the right decision. Sceptically asking myself if I’m capable of completing a PhD. And constantly asking myself if pursuing a PhD at this point in my life is even worth it.

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