Last year in November, Alia Wong published an article in The Atlantic that detailed the various ways that PhD students often suffer from mental illness. The factors that put a strain on these students’ mental health are familiar: long-term employment prospects are poor, some students accumulate massive debt, and getting the the PhD is an intellectually taxing enterprise. Mix that together, and you get a recipe for stress and unhappiness.
The article focuses on a study of economics PhDs, and according to the survey mentioned, they are three times more likely to experience depression than the general population. (About 6% of the general population experiences depression; roughly 18% of those surveyed did.) But economics is far from the only field where concerns about mental health loom large. A recent study at UC Berkley found that a much higher proportion of their student population suffered from apparent depression, including an astonishing 64% of surveyed students in the arts and humanities. Broadening to the full spectrum of mental health issues, a recent study found that 50% of academic scholars have experienced mental health issues due to their academic work, which is roughly double the rate at which the general population experiences mental health issues. And last year, Teresa Evans and her colleagues argued that there was sufficient evidence of a mental health crisis in graduate education.
I could list other findings, but you get the point: a lot of graduate students struggle with their mental health. Philosophy graduate students are no exception, and even after graduate school, most early career scholars who find employment spend time in temporary appointments where they are forced to go back in the job market within a year or two. Facing the need to continue publishing and teaching well so that they can brave the job market gauntlet again, these positions are often just as stressful as the tail end of graduate school. And even when stable employment is secured, many departments are just one change to the general education program away from their existence being in jeopardy. A tenure-track position is often not a panacea for the challenges of academic life.
When we consider all this, it should not be surprising that many of our colleagues are struggling to with depression, anxiety, and their ilk. The victims of these conditions are all around us, and yet we so rarely acknowledge this fact. Consider these remarks from Peter Railton’s 2015 Dewey Lecture:
And what of depression? Perhaps we all know the mask of depression, that frozen, affectless face we catch glimpses of on our students, colleagues, and friends. I can’t do anything about that. But perhaps I can do something about the face of depression—its visible image in the minds of our children and parents, teachers and students. Because in truth, we are still to a considerable degree still in a world of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” with regard to depression and associated mental disorders, such as anxiety, even though these will severely affect one in ten of us over the course of a lifetime, and often at more than one point in a lifetime.
Dr. Railton then goes onto describe his own experiences with depression and his reasons for disclosure. Despite his accomplishments and established position in the profession, he still fears that his admission will in some ways cause him to be reduced in the eyes of his colleagues – seen as flawed or inferior because of his history. Such concerns are, as he acknowledges, likely to be even stronger among those who are still at the early stages of their careers. But it is also crucial, in his view, to create an environment where people in professional philosophy can feel comfortable disclosing their mental illness and seeking treatment. The sad truth is that many remain reluctant to disclose these difficulties to others, and most who are actively struggling with their mental health do not seek any treatment. The result is that many innocent people are suffering, and some are even taking their own lives. Thus, the hope Dr. Railton expressed in his address was that he could help make a positive change in the academic environment we inhabit by making it more acceptable for people to be open about depression and similar ailments and feel more comfortable seeking treatment.
The studies I mentioned earlier show how bleak the picture is, though, and Peter Railton is only one person – only one representation of “the face of depression” (to borrow a phrase from his lecture). Perhaps then it is time to present another illustration of what this ailment can look like.
I had seen depression before. A severe depressive episode, coupled with an eating disorder, robbed one of my best friends of six months of his life, and while he eventually recovered, there was a long stretch where I feared his depression would get the better of him. Over the phone, it sounded as if all life had been drained from him – like I was only talking with a shell of the person who used to inhabit his body. I am still surprised – and grateful – that he survived that episode.
As an instructor, I once had a student who disclosed symptoms of depression to me in his responses to short answer questions on an exam. When I noticed, I reported the matter to the counseling center at the University of Tennessee. When this student returned to class, he shared with me that he had been spending his days almost entirely confined to bed and had been been severely depressed for more than month. While those who report students to the counseling center are not identified to the student, he noticed the timing between taking the exam and getting the phone call from the counseling center and deduced that I must have been the one who notified them. I wondered whether the student would be ambivalent about what I had done, but he only expressed gratitude at my helping him get free from that state of mind.
These experiences and a few others had given me a peek behind the veil, so the impact of Dr. Railton’s lecture was not lost on me when I read the manuscript of it for the first time. Based on others’ reactions, it clearly resonated with a lot of the philosophers who attended the lecture. But time quickly relegated it to memory, and despite some challenges with the dissertation, I never had any struggles with mental illness in graduate school. After escaping with the PhD unscathed, I believed that my mental health could only get better since the stress of dissertation work had passed.
Just before the fall semester started in 2018, I spent a week in Colorado at the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress. I gave a pair of commentaries – one at the pre-conference animal ethics workshop and one at the main event itself. I spent a lot of time outside the main conference events going out for dinner and drinks with friends and even squeezing in a group venture to The Wild Animal Sanctuary. But there was a cost: for one week straight, I got to sleep between 1 and 3 am Mountain Time. When I went back to the east coast (a 2-hour time change), I struggled to get to sleep any earlier than 4:00 am. This did not translate well to teaching an early morning class on Mondays and Wednesdays and gradually evolved into a pattern of early-waking insomnia and deeply irregular sleep patterns.
Even so, through September, it didn’t matter a whole lot. I managed to stay productive and keep up with my work through the first six weeks of the term, and I was slowly adjusting my sleep schedule back toward something that could be considered normal. But things started to get out of hand when I went back on the job market. October was packed with deadlines for tenure-track jobs, so that meant there were cover letters to tailor, HR systems to navigate, online profiles to update, and a myriad of old statements to revise.
As anyone who has been on the market knows, it is not a pleasant experience and sucks up an outrageous amount of your time (assuming you send out a sizeable number of applications). So I expected that my quality of life would dip for a little while just like it did in 2016. There would be a few weeks with an increased workload and some late nights, but it would pass.
Except this time, it didn’t pass. It only got worse. Night after night in late October, I was seated in the dim glow of my computer monitor editing cover letters and attaching PDFs until 3:00 am. When I tried to squeeze in a few hours of sleep before waking up at 7:00 to prep my morning class, the passage to unconsciousness often eluded me. My alarm would sound hours later when I was still awake, and I’d feel like lying down had just been a waste of time. Other nights, when I’d be so exhausted that I would fall asleep early, my reverie would be short-lived, and I’d wake up at 3:00 or 4:00 am having only slept a few hours.
Progressing on my research during this stretch was a lost cause. I didn’t have the energy. It was all I could do to keep meeting job application deadlines and teaching competently. Worse yet, I was starting to absolutely hate my weekly routine. There seemed to be nothing in my professional life that brought me any sense of enjoyment or satisfaction. It all felt shallow and meaningless. There was a voice in my head reminding me that in 2016 only 1 of my 90 job applications had ultimately been successful. “That means that almost all this time you’re spending is wasted,” it would say. “This suffering is mostly pointless. Why are you doing this? What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Driving around Tampa became distressing. I know all too well what sleep deprivation does to a person’s reaction time and how it impairs one’s driving abilities, and in my experience, Florida drivers are not too patient or observant. Worse than that, the voice would occasionally chime in with unsettling observations. “You know,” it would nag, “the speed limit is 45, but everyone’s going at least 50 – including you. If you just edged across the median, there’d probably be no survivors.”
When we think about cases of suicide, we might conjure up images of an angsty teen who has an elaborate plan about how he’ll commit suicide at some particular date and time to teach all those who have spited him a lesson. There are cases like that, of course, but suicidal ideation can be much more insidious and involuntary. With respect to my own life, I do not consider suicide an acceptable option. To echo Principle Gardner from one of the more memorable scenes from Charlie Bartlett, “I can’t kill myself. I got too many responsibilities.” And beyond that, good parents deserve to be spared the tragedy of outliving their children. My parents are good parents, and so I believe I am obligated to outlive them if I can.
At one point, Peter Railton characterizes depression as a conflict between the mind and the body, but in my case, the relevant conflict was between two different parts of the mind – the rational, principled self that encapsulates my core values and a doppelganger that had spawned seemingly with the sole purpose of sabotaging my life. A conflict between my true self and a shadow self trying to uproot him.
So sure, I had principled reasons for not thinking about suicide, but the shadow self does not care about your principles or the reasons that underlie them. The shadow self will sometimes use logic in an effort to unravel you. If referencing facts and making arguments is the best means of making you hate yourself and your life, then that’s what it will do. But the shadow self does not need logic. If that strategy fails, the shadow self is perfectly satisfied to use other tactics – to conjure unpleasant memories, to cultivate irrational doubts, to play on your fears – anything that will make your life worse. Because of this, the shadow self cannot be vanquished by rational deliberation alone.
Throughout the entire experience, I was reminding myself that things were not that bad on the whole. Objectively, that was true. I know, for example, based on a peer observation and my student evaluations from that semester that my teaching went very well. The students did not look upon me as an incompetent instructor who ambled into class tired and frustrated every single day even though that is precisely how it felt. As someone who had suffered from depressive episodes for 30 years told me, “The disconnect between how you feel you’re doing and how the rest of the world perceives you is one of the enduring mysteries of the experience.”
My coping strategies were not the best. In part, this was because I did not accurately assess my circumstances. As I mentioned earlier, I expected to feel stressed and overworked in October. It wasn’t until the end of November that I started to realize how bad things had gotten. If I had been more familiar with the characteristics of a major depressive episode, I might have understood what was going on earlier. There are nine symptoms of a major depressive episode:
- Depressed mood
- Loss of interest or pleasure
- Change in appetite
- Change in sleep
- Change in body activity (psychomotor changes)
- Loss of energy
- Feelings of worthlessness and excessive or inappropriate guilt
- Indecisiveness or a decrease in concentration
- Suicidal ideation
To be diagnosed as experiencing one of these episodes, you must exhibit one of the top two symptoms (in bold) and at least four other symptoms for period of at least two weeks. Once the thought had occurred to me and I looked up this list, it was obvious what was going on. Aside from maintaining my normal eating habits and not having any detectable psychomotor changes, every other symptom was present.
Before I came to understand my situation, I mainly fought against the depression by trying to keep my brain occupied with other activities. Specifically, I found that it was easy to silence the shadow self when I was either immersed in a good video game or playing tennis. So I decided October was a good time to start new playthroughs of Persona 5 and Fallout 4, which are both ludicrously long games. Caught up in those alternate universes, it was easy to forget just how bad life felt in the real world.
Playing tennis was effective for a very different reason. I played competitively in the juniors and in college, and so I have spent many thousands of hours on a tennis court during my lifetime. At this point, so much of it is muscle memory and pattern recognition. On court, it was easy to tune out the shadow self and just focus on the next shot or the next point. Given my sleep problems, prioritizing tennis had the odd result that I would sometimes spend more hours on the tennis court than I had slept the night before – a behavior that I would normally describe as unhealthy and stupid. But these were hardly normal circumstances, and two hours of freedom from the shadow self was often too valuable to pass up. Some nights after those sessions, my body was so fatigued that sleep – real sleep – did not elude me.
These activities, however, were not a substitute for real therapy. Eventually, I contacted an old friend who happens to be a licensed clinical psychologist and discussed what was going on. That initial conversation left me so emotionally exhausted that I could barely utter a word by the end of the phone call. After I hung up, I crawled into bed and stared up at the ceiling in my darkened bedroom. It was a little after 9:00, and I worried that if I fell asleep now, I would wake up at 2:00 and be unable to get back to sleep. While pondering that matter, a slow but steady stream of tears started to trail down my cheeks. So much sadness, I thought. How can there be so much sadness within me. Why is this happening?
It is easy for me to understand why so few people disclose their mental struggles and why so few of those in pain seek treatment. Disclosure requires making oneself vulnerable in a very raw and personal way, and seeking treatment carries with it a tacit acknowledgement that you cannot handle things on your own. Given the social norms that pressure men to exude toughness and self-sufficiency – to never show weakness or rely on others – they are particularly prone to keep their struggles to themselves. Disclosure also comes with the risk of being judged by others. There is still a heavy stigma attached to mental illness. People often assume such individuals are irrational, socially incompetent, weak-willed, emotionally unstable, or some combination of these things. These traits are then used as justification for ridicule, condemnation, or disassociation. (If you want examples, consider some of the remarks made on the reddit post devoted to discussing Railton’s Dewey Lecture.)
Academia is littered with accomplished people who also have a history of mental illness, but these negative attitudes are so entrenched that occasional counterexamples are not enough to upend them. The result is that many people stay silent about their suffering. Tragically, in doing so, they eliminate the one significant advantage they have over the shadow self.
The shadow self shares your memories, knows your fears, and is not restricted by the limits of rationality in its efforts to destroy you. In a straightforward confrontation, it’s a tough foe to defeat, and fighting it one-on-one plays right into its hands. The good news is that you don’t have to fight it alone.
Around the time that I was getting ready for another job market push, I disconnected from a few of my social groups. I was active on a couple Discord servers and muted those apps. (Discord is a social media app geared toward gamers but hosts a lot of groups that span a wide range of interests.) I cut down on attending department events, and I generally stayed away from Facebook. I wanted to keep distractions to a minimum while I focused on churning out applications. That was a reasonable thought, but looking back, this was a terrible mistake. It created and reinforced a pernicious isolation. I should have been making time to keep in touch with the people in my online circles and tried to be a little more socially active in the local community, and I did precisely the opposite.
By the end of November – when I had finally come to recognize the gravity of the situation – I took solace in the fact that I only had about two weeks to endure before I could take some time off for the holidays. But my friend – who was functioning as my makeshift therapist – made a pretty firm request: if things don’t improve significantly by the start of the semester in January, I had to get some more substantial therapy – in person from someone in Tampa. I agreed to that condition and grinded through the remainder of the term.
Fortunately, there was only one job application with a deadline that fell during winter break, and I avoided doing any other work over that stretch. The time back at home was awkward: I had straightforwardly told my parents what I had been going through and tried to contextualize it so that they wouldn’t panic, but they could tell that something was still wrong. My eyes were too deadened, my energy levels too low, my voice too labored.
Within a few days, my sleep cycle again resembled something normal, and after a week of sleeping through the night, I felt somewhat human again. Things still weren’t right, but it was a start. Some time with family and friends helped to abate the emptiness within. Yet I was still afraid. I’d been falling down a chasm and just managed to grab onto a ledge to halt my fall. Now I had to climb back up to the surface, well aware that a misstep could send me falling back down again.
When I was back in Florida, I made a few changes to my routine. First, I limited myself to two job applications per day. No exceptions. Second, I truncated my teaching preparation. I was teaching philosophy of religion that semester – a subject I knew well but had never taught before. Normally, I would have spent a lot of time developing PowerPoint slides and thinking about how I wanted to structure discussions and in-class exercises. This semester, I mainly stuck to using the dry-erase board to save myself prep time and let discussion be a little more free-flowing than usual. I also reoriented many of my assessments to be online so that I could take advantage of the auto-grading features and avoid having to decipher had student handwriting on essay questions. Third, I scheduled a 10-day vacation in May so that I would have something to look forward to during the semester.
I managed to turn a revise-and-resubmit into a publication in January, but beyond that, I did not do much research in the spring. Even with the changes I had made to my routine and with additional efforts made to protect my sleep and get outside a few times a week to play tennis, it took about 3 months to climb out of the chasm I had fallen into. When I emerged, I was able to recognize that my life still mostly sucked – I was still living somewhere I didn’t care for, still losing a dozen hours a week to job applications and interviews (with no positive results), and still frustrated and unhappy with how the year was going – but at least I felt like myself again. A massive improvement!
Unfortunately, recovery from one major depressive episode may not be the end of the story. About 50% of those who have one will have another one later in life. Once the shadow self manifests, it can be suppressed but not always purged. Does this mean that we’ll meet again at some point? Who knows? At least if there’s a next time, I will be better equipped to handle him.
A few people who endured similar circumstances in the last year have asked me in private how I managed to escape that depressed mental state. I’ve tried to explain the process in my prior remarks, but I think I can also narrow it down to a few concrete suggestions:
- Investigate if you think something is wrong. I think a known enemy is much easier to fight than an unknown enemy. Once I understood that I was experiencing a depressive episode, it was easier to identify some steps I could take to try and make things better.
- Stay connected to your peers, even if that mostly consists of long-distance relationships. Don’t allow yourself to become isolated when things are not going well: this will only make things worse.
- Be willing to satisfice with your work. There are a lot of pressures that push academics toward perfectionism, especially those in early career positions who have to produce at the level and quantity of already tenured faculty just to be semi-competitive for permanent positions. Yet the tendency toward perfectionism has to be resisted or else you may well work yourself into oblivion.
- Protect your hobbies. I’ve written about this before, but it’s perhaps even more important in the context of fending off the shadow self. You have to maintain a few things in your life that you enjoy – no matter what.
- Protect your sleep. I still wonder how much of this whole debacle just boils down to several months of sleep deprivation. I doubt it was just that since I’ve endured extended bouts of reduced sleep before without the catastrophic change in subjective experience that this involved, but sleep deprivation was certainly a catalyst to the whole thing.
- Get counseling if you need it. If you’re not able to make progress on your own, reach out to a professional who can help you. Yes, doing so will make you feel very vulnerable, and yes, if others learn about what you’re going through, it might lead to awkward conversations or hasty judgments on their part. But this is your life. Is it really worth suffering so much (or even dying) just to avoid the possibility that some other people make hurtful judgments about you? Surely not: your life is too valuable. A lot of people suck, but don’t let those people be the reason you don’t seek help.
Obviously, there is more that could be done, but this exhausts what I have learned from personal experience. I want to conclude with two additional thoughts. First, the timing of this experience has made me acutely aware of how vulnerable early career scholars are to depression and the like. After graduate school, they are likely to move halfway across the country (or further) and often to places where they have few friends or acquaintances. They are likely to be in a temporary position of some sort and have uncertain long-term career prospects. Because they are likely to be on the job market again in the near future or on the tenure clock, they are probably under significant pressure to produce quality research and continue to improve their teaching. They are likely to be at an age where it has become harder to form meaningful friendships and one where biological realities necessitate starting a family soon if they want to have one.
On the whole, early career scholars are likely to have a limited or fractured social support network and are probably working under incredibly stressful and demanding conditions. These factors increase the risk of a bout with mental illness. For those (like myself) who have emerged from such bouts, we are left to wonder whether the pursuit of an academic career warrants so much suffering and sadness and the risk of its recurrence. Is it really worth it? I’ve not yet reached an answer.
Second, I know that there are some people reading this who are caught in the snare of the shadow self – and probably many more who were in such a position in the past. You may feel worthless. You may think no one cares about your work or your life. You may think your work is not good enough – that it will never be good enough – to earn others’ approval or land you the job you want. You might feel weak and powerless. You might wonder whether you wasted your twenties in graduate school just to have a career that you’ll ultimately end up hating. You may wake up every day thinking it can’t get worse… only to be proven wrong again and again.
But remember this: you are not alone. There are lots of other people in similar circumstances and lots of people who are willing to support you when you’re down. As tempting as it might be to try to stick things out on your own, remember that real strength sometimes manifests not in managing to do everything yourself but in having the courage to ask for help when you really need it.
Thanks for writing this
Posted by: anonymous | 05/20/2019 at 11:02 AM
I would also like to commend you for writing this. I suffered from depression during a bad stage in my career. I didn't know it was depression at the time, since I had never experienced it before, but if I had looked at the symptoms you list here, I probably would have gotten help sooner.
Posted by: Ian | 05/20/2019 at 11:43 AM
I too want to thank you for writing this. I have suffered from mental illnesses throughout my career but have been too afraid to disclose it out of fear of possible negative repercussions. I appreciate your courage and hope more people speak out. Maybe I will if I can muster up the courage. I think the extreme stress and isolation of academia may have caused or at least contributed my illnesses, and that having to keep it all inside as a secret may only increase the stress and isolation, contributing to a downward mental spiral. I also think that the more of a secret we keep it the less of an incentive the profession has to take active steps to improve things. So I thank you from the bottom of my heart for speaking out and sharing your story.
Posted by: Anonymous | 05/20/2019 at 12:53 PM
Thank you Trevor, a lot of that rang true for me. I suffered a major depressive episode as a postdoc, not helped by being in a misogynistic department. I experienced suicidal ideation (just enough to pull me away was the idea of my kid and my spouse and my sense of responsibility to them), basically losing all joy in life, energy, somehow I still found the time to write stuff (I mechanistically put time aside every day). It did improve a lot not just when I got (finally after 5 years on the market) a tenure track job, but also before when I made the decision to try to gain some control over my life and do things I found meaningful. But it was very difficult. Also, frequent relocations make one without support network and isolated, a further recipe for mental illness.
Posted by: Helen | 05/20/2019 at 03:39 PM
I know depression all to well. Since high school I’ve suffered from dysthymia. But the philosophy job market caused me to become quasi suicidal. I would walk across roads without looking carefully, because I kind of wanted to get hit— I was thinking a hospital stay would be a nice break. I managed to get some help and got better. But I still struggle with dysthymia. Although the philosophy job market made me more miserable than I had ever been, I think my issues are connected with childhood trauma and a narcissistic father. So I can’t blame all my problems on philosophy.
Posted by: Postdoc | 05/20/2019 at 04:10 PM
Thanks for the feedback, everyone. It's sad that this is such a common experience, but it reiterates the need to speak up about the matter and thinking about the ways we can create a supportive environment for those in need.
Posted by: Trevor Hedberg | 05/20/2019 at 07:09 PM
Thank you for sharing.
Around when I was preparing for my comprehensive exam in graduate school I suffered a major anxiety attack that, in hindsight, had slowly been building for weeks, if not months. I spent a few days, maybe a week, continually doing shots to keep the anxiety down. I didn't leave the apartment. By the end the alcohol wasn't having an affect and I finally realized I needed help. Until that point the thought that I might need help was overshadowed by the thought that very bad things were imminent and that I just needed to hide. So, I took myself to a hospital. I was almost involuntarily admitted for psychiatric care, but I was instead sent home after a night of observation with a prescription for a benzodiazepine. I also started therapy. Like Trevor, I think it took around 3 months for things to stabilize. I still struggled to leave the apartment during that time. I wasn't teaching and was just preparing for comprehensive exams, so few people noticed. It was probably another year until things were somewhat normal again. I was in therapy and seeing a psychiatrist for maybe two or three years? I would have to check the dates. That was all 7 years ago now, and while I'm stable on a day-to-day basis, I still have more mild, but still serious, anxiety episodes once or twice or a year, and many of my days are still perfused with mild anxiety. As one can imagine, this all has not been conducive to a career in philosophy. But I'm still trying. Much of my problems are probably just me, and my main fears have nothing to do with philosophy, but philosophy provides all sorts of stressors and triggers that make things bad. And, of course, sometimes I worry about philosophy and ever finding a job.
Posted by: An Anxious Philosopher | 05/20/2019 at 08:25 PM
Thank you for writing this. If I had more courage I would share my own mental health struggles on this platform. For now I’ll echo that sleep is sacred and I will add that there is no shame in taking antidepressants in conjunction with talk therapy.
Posted by: Elizabeth Scarbrough | 05/21/2019 at 12:42 AM
I think that depression related to the academy (PhD students, job seekers) could be at least to some extent "treated" with a more friendly and supportive academic environment. But unfortunately, this is not the case.
Some students struggle with the PhD dissertation alone, because they do not have a good supervisor who can guide them in a systematic way, give them feedback and advice in an already very stressful period of their lives. This can certainly cause depression, especially if it entails less productivity and consequently a negative appreciation made by the supervisor or other members of the academic community. I remember once a talk I had with a professor about one of his PhD students who had explicitly said to another of his students that he was thinking about commiting suicide. I do not know if it was related with the PhD, but the Professor, who was his supervisor, told me: "it is not my business". This kind of reactions or thoughts are probably more common than we think, and besides of being inhuman (who can say those words when he knows that someone he knows has suicidal thoughts?), it should be a duty of a professor to care--at least in his role of supervisor-- about the mental health of his students.
A stressful and depressive state can come after the PhD, like in my case. After my PhD defence, the institution where I was left me completely alone and just erased me. I remember the director calling me just to ask me when I was going to liberate my desk (probably my foreign origin had something to do with this attitude)... The philosophers working in my field also forgot me and did not offer any help or support to try at least to make me feel I was part of something bigger and encourage me to continue writing and applying and participating in certain way of this philosophical community. With important financial issues, no support and, what is more, criticism for not being able to produce enough (even when I did not have an academic job, and sometimes did not have a job at all), it was easy for me to fall into depression. In my case, I know that my mild depression was not caused by internal factors, such a luck of meaning in life, but by the toxic and unsupportive academic and intellectual environment that surrounded me. I know that if this environment had been different, I would not have suffered the way I did, even without a job in academia.
In conclusion, I think that in many cases stress and depression in academia has not their origin in the individual who suffers these conditions, but in the way the environment affects the individual. So the suggestions Marcus is offering are nice and can be helpful, but more helpful would be to rethink these relations between institutions, professors and (ex) PhD students. More institutional strategies should be taken to help PhD students (especially outside the US: in my institution in Europe there was nothing to help PhD students with job search), and advice and suggestions should be given to professors, who by the way should be more controlled for bullying, unrespectful behavior, or absence of supervision. I am sure these measures could be very helpful to avoid many cases of depression related to academia.
Posted by: Marina | 05/21/2019 at 11:11 AM
I also just want to say thank you for writing this Trevor. Its such an important and difficult topic and I think that one of the best things we can do is raise awareness by sharing our stories.
Posted by: Paul | 05/22/2019 at 02:27 PM
This post is amazing - my daughter is going through ALL of this currently and this post helps me understand what is happening, as best as I can. I still don't know how to help her from my end, but I so appreciate you sharing this with those of us who see this depression in our adult children. I have never felt more powerless as a mother and my heart hurts with hers.
Thank you for informing us and making us aware.
Posted by: Suzanne Irwin | 06/16/2019 at 02:34 PM