Tag: PHD STUDENT WELL-BEING

Losing Belonging, Value, and Financial Safety to Motherhood: An International Student’s PhD Story by Joyce Vromen 

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In the early stages of my PhD, I felt like I belonged. With not just hard work and passion carrying me through, but the sense of fitting the system being like cycling with the wind in your back. I arrived as a motivated international PhD student on the other side of the world, full of ambition and excitement, eager to prove myself, contribute, and learn. 

I had grown up in The Netherlands with a keen interest in human behaviour and cognition. I completed my bachelor degree at the Radboud University Nijmegen and then went on to complete a highly competitive 2-year research master degree cum laude at the University of Amsterdam. As part of this latter program, I first ended up in Australia, interning in a university research lab. Looking back now, I would describe my young self as bright, ambitious, and adventurous. These days, being a mother to two teenage daughters, I can’t help but feel quite fond of and protective towards this young woman.  

What I didn’t imagine was becoming a mother of twins in the middle of my PhD – and how quickly that would unravel my academic identity, financial independence, and mental wellbeing. I eventually developed depression in the aftermath of my PhD, psychotic depression to be precise. The main signs were extreme tiredness, low energy levels, cynicism, feelings of excessive self-doubt, impostor feelings, and for short bursts during periods of depression, experiences of delusions and hallucinations centring around not being good enough. It all felt very confusing and overwhelming and I initially experienced intense shame over my mental health status. Especially around my psychotic symptoms. I had internalized society its strong stigma still associated with such mental health challenges and it compounded my feelings of being an outsider and failure.

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Persisting and Prevailing: Part-time PhD Study Through a Pandemic by Anonymous

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Before the Covid-19 pandemic, I went straight from redundancy and burnout to a full-time research masters, then embarked on a full-time PhD. I was regularly commuting between cities to have separate, quiet study space and returning home as my place of rest, as I’m neurodivergent and need the structure of separating studying and home life. 

Nevertheless, the burnout was lurking and around a year into the PhD, I decided I needed to go part-time. I scoured the funder and university policies, then referred to the sections on part-time study to help make my case. One supervisor questioned if I wanted to continue with the PhD. Without hesitation, I responded emphatically “yes”. Finding something difficult is not the same as not wanting or being unable to do it, and the easiest way is not always the best way. I had secured this opportunity to research the only topic I would have pursued, and I was not prepared to let it go.

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Navigating Anxiety in an Experimental Lab: Personal Growth and Peer Support by Janaky Sunil

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When people think of someone pursuing a PhD, they often focus on the prestige and intellectual fulfilment associated with earning the degree. For the students themselves, however, the journey is frequently remembered as a continuous obstacle course, with many never reaching the end. Statistics underscore this reality, with studies suggesting that 33% to 70% of PhD students ultimately leave before completing their program. A recent paper in Frontiers of Psychology enlists the various factors that contribute to these outcomes, leading to notable differences across institutions and countries. The academic culture in the nation of study and more specifically the institution plays a significant role in determining the work environment. Additionally, the quality of mentorship, the complexity of the research project, and the stability of funding are all pivotal. Combined, these factors result in the fact that even for those who do complete their PhD, the process often takes much longer than anticipated.

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The Abuse of Power in Academia: Consequences for Mental Health by Alex Mendelsohn

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“I’m thinking of leaving academia,” a friend tells me. “I’m pretty sick and tired of all the political games”. This should have been shocking news. He was the type of person that seemed perfectly suited to being an astrophysicist. I never foresaw him doing anything else.

I wasn’t surprised though. In my time as a PhD student, I heard countless episodes of political game-playing by postdocs and academics. For example, my housemate (a PhD student in the biological sciences), would frequently come to me with a new story about how his supervisor would attempt to use any leverage available to make him do work to advance the supervisor’s own career instead of my housemate’s PhD. “We are just pawns on a chess board to them.” he would often say. 

He meant this figuratively. He didn’t realise academics sometimes literally use students as pseudo chess pieces. When I needed to change offices due to a couple of toxic colleagues, I found that the process was a prolonged one. Most of the academics recognised that a desk, occupied or not, was a status symbol. The more desks each academic presided over, the higher their status. It was like some sort of weird conglomerate of empires. Giving up an empty desk space meant losing “territory”. My supervisor, despite thinking this was dumb, had to negotiate a PhD student “swap” with another research group. 

Before I started my PhD, I saw academics as mature, upstanding members of society. It was certainly a shock to the system to discover that, on occasion, some academics acted like toddlers in a sandpit squabbling over who has the better sandcastle. In these power struggles, PhD students are the spades – tools to be used by academics which can be disposed of at any moment, once they have served their purpose.

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Alone With My Anxiety: The Isolation of Doing a PhD Whilst Suffering With Anxiety by Isabelle Berrow 

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I believe that I have spent my whole life anxious. As long as I can remember, I have worried about things that other children did not. I was scared of getting hurt, getting muddy, trying new things out, of a fear of failure. I always felt different from the others. 

Whenever I voiced these concerns I was told ‘Don’t be silly’ or ‘You’re no fun to be around’. As a little girl, these comments were extremely damaging to how I viewed the anxiety within me. I was ashamed, appalled and determined to not let anyone know how I was truly feeling. 

So I spent my whole childhood, my teenage years and even into my 20s pretending I was somebody else. 

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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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Addressing lone working for PhD students by Chrissie Thwaites 

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It is relatively well-known both within and beyond academia that doing a PhD can be an isolating and lonely experience. Mental health in academia is now an increasingly prominent area of discussion, and many are working hard to cultivate an environment in which wellbeing is prioritised. In this blog I will discuss one area that could benefit from receiving more attention, especially in relation to PhD student isolation, namely the reality of lone-working. 

PhD students: Going it alone

Given the central role of conducting independent research, it is unsurprising that much of PhD life is characterised by working in solitude. There may be opportunities for networking, such as reading groups, research seminars, writing groups, and the occasional conference – but ultimately the task of researching and writing a thesis can only be completed by the researcher themselves. This will usually be done from home, a library, perhaps sometimes a coffee shop, or (for those who are lucky) a designated desk or departmental study space. 

This means that for many students, accepting a PhD place also means committing to 3-4 years (if full-time) of predominantly lone working. Often, this is a commitment made unknowingly. As a postgraduate research degree, a PhD is the first long-term academic research project students will undertake. Although they will have (presumably) a background in academic study, and may have submitted a short thesis as part of a previous degree, the day-to-day realities of PhD working will be somewhat unfamiliar. Those pursuing the industry expectation for research with ‘impact’ could be especially isolated – stuck in the predicament of producing unique research (and maybe receiving funding for it) partly because no one else is really doing it. Such research could feel isolating at times. The researcher may be the only one at their university, in their region, or even their country working in that particular area.  

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Growth, Healing, and Understanding: The Importance of Humanity in Academia by Sydney Conroy

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There is often talk in the media about healing your inner child, but far less talk about healing your inner teenager. When it comes to my time in academia as a doctoral student, I have found attending to the wounds of my inner teenager has allowed me to experience something else that is seldom spoken about: healing during a PhD. 

For me, my teenage years were the years that solidified some painful stories I told about my self-worth and value, particularly around education. I often felt like I needed to provide ‘value’ to my peers by doing the most work on group assignments; I thought it would mean more people would like me or want to be my friend. I realised consciously about that time that the adults in my world were only interested in what I accomplished, what my grades were, and the topics I was learning about; I began internalising that what I was doing was more important than who I was being as what I was curious about or confused about. My entire interior world, including my mental health and wellbeing, was less of a topic of conversation than school. Grades mattered, and because I was encouraged for ‘my best’ to be the same as ‘the best’ (as in the actual highest score), I felt like I failed other people for not being the smartest or the top-performing student in the room.  

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Grad School Journaling Prompts: Better Understanding Your Emotional Academic Journey by Jordan A. McCray

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Making the decision to leave grad school might have been the hardest thing I have ever done. Graduate students are frequently told that ruminations on leaving are normal, and that wanting to quit constantly is a rite of passage. However, the thought of leaving is framed as a common daydream that gets us through to the next break rather than a legitimate alternative to powering through constant suffering. Constant commiseration is an understandable coping mechanism in fostering understanding in academic communities. It also begs the question: How do you know if it’s really time to leave? How do you discern between “relatable” misery and the need to take action for your own health and wellbeing? 

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Studying while Recovering: Learning to be Authentically Me by Lizzie Salter

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TW: Suicidal ideation, eating disorder

In 2017 I started my Undergraduate course in BA Geography. Going into it, I had my own perceptions of what a ‘perfect’ student, researcher and scientist looked like. I thought to be successful you needed to have an empowered, independent, and busy personality. The ‘hustle’ movement of glamorising all-nighters and drinking as many energy drinks as you can to give you the anxiety buzz needed for staying awake. I thought my diary needed to be full of study days, extra sessions, and experience in the field. I struggled with all of these because as a recovering anorexic with bipolar disorder and a long history of perfectionism I found it hard to meet both the expectations I put on myself and the reality of university life.

It took a lot of courage for me to be able to talk to my supervisors, my tutors and my institution about the mental health issues I was facing, and it took an admission to the mental health crisis team to finally take that step of saying, “Hey—I am not okay and I need support.” For the remaining two years of my degree, I constantly battled between wanting to be the best I could be and do the best I could do, but also struggling with being a student with a mental illness. In my third year, March 2020, I hit a rock bottom with that struggle and it nearly ended my life. I was underweight, severely depressed and I had little energy to function without thinking about dissertations, research, and lectures. 

Fast forward to present day: I am a Post Graduate Researcher in Law and Criminology working on research that I believe has changed my perceptions of not only academia but also life in recovery. My aim with this blog is to share some of my coping strategies I have learned along the way with you.

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