dorktastic

The Disgruntled Academic: Mental Health and Graduate School

disgruntled:

lowendtheory nails it:

… a lot of the mental health problems that i see graduate students struggling with have as much to do with the forms of micro- and macro-hierarchy through which the academic profession is structured, as well as the attitudes toward graduate students through which it…

I am a much, much happier and healthier person since leaving grad school. It was probably the worst 3 years of my life, except for teaching, which was amazing (sometimes, I think my students actually kept me alive). Now that I am planning to go back to school in September, I am back to feeling anxious. I wake up, and my jaw is tight from grinding my teeth all night, my nails are all chewed up, and I’m not sleeping as well. I have spent a lot of time talking to other people, particularly other women, about graduate school, and most of us found it to be a toxic environment. I can only speculate, but I do think it’s a lot worse for women than men, as we are socialized into this bizarre perfectionism - we’re supposed to be perfect all the time, but no one is supposed to know we worked hard for it. We’re supposed to look perfect, but without looking like we tried too hard, even though it takes huge amounts of time, money, and effort to do so. I found it was the same thing in grad school - you’re supposed to be brilliant and insightful, but never admit to struggling. You could admit to working hard, but only if it supported your role as an obsessive genius. Working all night in the library was acceptable, admitting that you didn’t understand something, or were totally overwhelmed, not so much. I spent most of my time in grad school feeling stupid, incompetent, and isolated. In retrospect, I can see that I was part of a system that placed us all under enormous stress, as we were forced to compete against our friends and peers for grades, scholarships, grant money, conference presentations, and jobs, while being treated as a source of cheap and expendable teaching labour. All while being warned over and over again that we would be lucky to find any teaching job, let alone a stable teaching job, when we came out the other end. And then they wondered why so many of us were suffering from anxiety and depression, and why people were self-medicating at the student pub. I found a doctor at the medical centre who handed out Xanax like candy, and ended up in an abusive relationship. I know that it was much worse for others. The people who had children, the international students who were far from home and paying more than double the fees of domestic students, and the students who were too ashamed to go to Disability Services to get accommodations for their mental health issues, or were unable to get a diagnosis, let alone treatment, because student mental health services was so overloaded. Source: lowendtheory