As I was browsing social media yesterday, I came across the following article for which I have included the link. The piece is about the mental health struggles of a particular student during her graduate studies.
My purpose in writing this blog post is to tell my own story and to further the dialogue in generating a better environment in which we train future scientist. Mental health issues among graduate students is a phenomenon that is well known, but I have encountered any sustainable solutions. This observation is purely anecdotal and not based on a survey of different programs. I know I am not alone in my struggles, but I do not want to compromise the privacy of anyone who has shared with me their own personal fight against depression and anxiety, so here is just my experience with some questions about what we can do to better train our future scientists.
I began my graduate studies in 2012 at Royal Holloway University of London. I was thrilled to be studying at my first choice program. I like the student, in the original article, have a history of depression and other mental health issues, mostly situational. My joy at starting my program gradually ebbed away and was replaced by suffocating anxiety.
So how did this manifest itself? On bad days, I felt a deep sadness and discouragement in depths of my personhood. I woke up each morning with a sense of dread and panic. My shoulders and jaw ached after a night of living through tension I could never escape. I test as an extrovert on any personality test, I have ever taken, yet I developed social anxiety and avoided people. This had a doubling sabotaging effect as extrovert, I need the social relationships.
On the worst days, I dreaded getting out of bed in the morning. I wanted to escape life itself. Yet I know I had to move forward. Everything depended on me. So I went to work anyways. I tried to brush away the voices that constantly told me I was a failure and unworthy of the position. (Imposter syndrome is also rampant amount graduate students and I am no exception.)
I did seek counseling for a short while, which only moderately helped. I told a superior once of my struggles who accused me of laziness and said that they were not interested in my personal problems. I never mentioned it again. I learned in this field, your results are what matter, not personhood. So I internalized the pains. I was able to manage much of this through exercise until a difficult pregnancy made this impossible. So I further repressed.
When I entered the final year, I had no time to deal with mental health issues. I was working full time, researching full time, and attempting to be a mother. So ignored everything and fought the anxiety related distraction. I did cross the finish line, but it was a messy completion, in which I feel more shame than accomplishment.
Now I live with the consequences. My anxiety on some days in disabling. I struggle to drive a car for fear of a crash. Some days I am driven to such a deep distraction that some days I accomplish very little. This is followed by feelings of failure. I am seeking help and I have taken some time to heal from my mental issues before beginning my next research endeavor. I have started to exercise again, which I hope will help. Even as I write this, I am terrified that sharing this information could be detrimental. I do not wish to be judged as a physicist by what I have struggled through to get where I am.
We do need to talk about the mental struggles of graduate students. First, we need to de-stigmatize these issues. I love the idea of having mental health forums as a part of graduate programs. These do not even need to be science specific, as these problems are not unique to the field. In my orientation, there was little mention of mental health services available. I would argue that this should be a bigger part since it is so prevalent among graduate students.
Lastly, I am hesitant to suggest this as I am not sure it is their role. In my case, my superiors were unsupportive and disinterested in my mental health. I know it would have helped me if I would have felt supported and safe. I want to fair to them, as I do not know what they were struggling with and some of the individuals I worked with provided excellent support in training me to be a proficient scientist. However, I cannot expect personal interest from superiors and at the end of the day, their job is only to ensure that I can do physics, not that I am healthy. Thus, I would argue for better mentorship programs focused on aiding students in progressing with their work even through personal issues to close this gap.
It is my hope that by writing this piece that I have put forward one more story to comfort anyone who feels that they are alone in their struggles. We need a good dialogue and we need good ideas on how to have better mental health during this grueling process.
Thank you so much for sharing!
ReplyDeleteI've struggled all my life with depression and anxiety. Thank you for sharing your stories. I've come to believe that everyone struggles with mental illness, but most people don't realize they are afflicted with it themselves.
ReplyDeleteI think it's human inability to resolve death as described below (source: Wikipedia).
Terror Management Theory (TMT) is derived from anthropologist Ernest Becker's 1973 Pulitzer Prize-winning work of nonfiction The Denial of Death, in which Becker argues most human action is taken to ignore or avoid the inevitability of death.