Tag: DEPRESSION

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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‘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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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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Loss of Identity: Surviving Post-PhD Depression by Amy Gaeta

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Completing the biggest achievement of my life has left me in the most zombie, emotionally depleted state of my life. Immediately after defending my dissertation successfully, thereby securing my Ph.D. in English, I found myself soft crying into a pillow and trying to find enough stability to reply to all the “congratulations!” text messages pinging on my phone. This emotional release marked the start of what I’ll refer to as my post-PhD depression: a state of aimlessness, premature cynicism, and loss sparked by the contradictory realization that it is all over and yet there is so much more to do. It is like finishing a marathon after giving all you got only to realize you’ve agreed to compete in a triathlon every day for the rest of your career.

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Ripping Off the Band-Aid: The Struggle of Asking for Help by Lauren Cuthbert

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Content warning: Depression, pet death

I’m a solitary person by nature. I prefer to spend my time in my own company, watching a film or a TV show, or crocheting to keep my hands busy. I don’t mind being in my own head – in fact, for the most part, I prefer it. I wasn’t fazed by lockdown: being told to stay indoors didn’t substantially alter my daily routine, and I figured I wouldn’t have much trouble adjusting to the state of the world if I was already used to spending the majority of my time in my room. Back in April of 2020, I was chatting with a friend who asked me how I was coping with lockdown. At the time, I’d been unemployed since graduating from my MA five months previously; I was in the process of applying for jobs, but also considering undertaking a PhD. I said, and I remember it exactly, “My life literally has not changed at all, so I’m fine.”

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I Don’t Want to Dance in the Dark: Disclosing Mental Illness and Neurodiversity in the Ableist Academy by Marco Miguel Valero Sanchez

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When I saw the call from Voices of Academia on Twitter actively seeking contributors to share their stories on mental health and well-being in academia, I thought: Wouldn’t a blog be a great way to share your own experiences with depression and ADHD in academia? Wouldn’t it also be an excellent opportunity to raise awareness about mental illness and neurodiversity in general? Why shouldn’t you give it a try? As usual, I was very tired that day. I had a sleepless and restless night, an unexpected panic attack in the morning, and a stronger depressive phase overall – perhaps because I already had a few days of holiday. I find such days off always give you the ‘opportunity’ to think intensively and continuously about yourself, your body, and your mind – whether you like it or not.

Perhaps my mental state was also the reason why my initial enthusiasm was immediately overtaken by self-doubt and pessimism, asking myself: Why would anyone care what you, of all people, have to say about the challenges and difficulties of managing mental health and well-being in academia? Who exactly would care about your personal story? And above all: Why would it make any difference and to whom? In fact, I cannot say whether anyone will read my personal story, care about it, or whether it will make any difference at all. But maybe these are the wrong questions and expectations to begin with. What I can say with absolute certainty, however, is that every voice matters with regard to mental health and well-being – in academia and beyond – and that every voice helps to shed light on a still taboo and mostly invisible topic. And in this respect, I am confident that my voice matters as well.

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Is success worth more than my life? By Norah Koch

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Note: Norah Koch is a pen name. The Voices of Academia team have worked with the blogger to ensure they have a support network in place. 

[Trigger Warning: Suicide, Suicidal Ideation]

I was seven years old when I read about a student who committed suicide because he failed his high school exams.

Back then, I used to read the newspaper daily. I was exposed to all kinds of information in the newspaper. I did not dwell much on thinking about the student. I didn’t know the person, and I did not feel any sadness. Newspapers usually have more bad news than good news anyway. I didn’t even understand what it meant. Someone died because he got bad grades. That was it.

I didn’t even bother to question why someone would commit suicide over bad grades. Let’s say that I was young when I read the news. Then again, I didn’t ask this question myself until I was a Masters student. Until I faced mental health issues because of academic pressure, I didn’t care about suicide. Now it sits in my thoughts. 

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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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A Thesis with a Side of Depression by Isabel Rojas-Ferrer

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We all know the running grad student gag: anxious, depressed, poor. We’ve seen the episode of ‘The Simpsons’ where Bart imitates a grad student. The thing about stereotypes is that they sometimes highlight very important truths. In fact, graduate students are 6x more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression when compared to the general population, resulting in what has been labelled a ‘mental health crisis’ within the academic community. Not only do many graduate students suffer from anxiety and depression, but they have to write a thesis during this highly pressurized time, and survive the ‘publish-or-perish’ culture in academia in order to graduate. Many graduate students surpass the writer’s block associated with anxiety and depression and become successful and thrive in academia, but sadly, some do not.

Like many of my peers, I suffer from anxiety and depression. I’ve experienced periods of incapacitation and hospitalization; simultaneously I have a Masters, am almost finished with my PhD, and am a published author. Fun fact: my family and my friends never suspected I was incapacitated as I kept smiling, making people laugh, taking care of my appearance, turning in my work, being ‘deceptively’ successful. 

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