The one about mental illness in academia
Two reports due Friday (for the same class!).
Class all day, work all night, homework some time in between.
Social time? Maybe Saturday. Sleep? For the weak.
Just drink some energy drinks.
Don’t worry about properly nourishing your body
Being overworked leads to stress.
Depression to more stress.
It’s a spiral of negative positive feedback.
At some point in the line, mental illness has become the Status Quo in academia. It is expected that undergraduate and graduate students are going to be stressed, riddled with anxiety, malnourished, underpaid, and depressed at some point in their academic careers. If a student makes it through the four years of undergraduate education without experiencing any of these things, it is rare. It is even rarer for graduate students.
I personally have had superiors say to me, “When I was in graduate school, I often stayed at work until 2am and didn’t get a lot of sleep because of everything I had to take care of, so I have no sympathy.”
Oh? I’m sorry, just because you had to go through it means I should go through it as well?
This mindset is tragic. There is no reason why any student should be pushed to the brink of mental illness. We shouldn’t accept this fate. As a future professor, I wish to fight against this norm, yet the only way I know how is to start a conversation about it. I care about my peers and my students. I want to see them succeed in their academic (and non-academic) careers, but more importantly, I want them to learn how to take care of themselves, how to manage their time, and how to deal with the many stressors of academic life because these skills will help them dominate any path they decide to follow. And we’re not even discussing the fact that most undergraduates are still teenagers when they begin college, and most of them have no idea what they want to do with their lives, what they’re passionate about, or who they actually are – it’s like having an identity crisis or an epiphany while you’re continuously piled with work, expectations, and debt.
I think a lot of this stems from the fact that many departments try to “weed out” students that “don’t belong” in a given program for whatever reason. I get that to an extent – attending college has become the “norm” in our society. Many academic institutions are accepting more and more students to college and have become less selective in the admittance process (even though they claim the opposite). Because of this, we have more and more students filtered through the academic system, many of which are only there because that’s what the “next step” in life is. We have stopped teaching our students that not attending college is 100% acceptable and okay. College isn’t for everyone! Especially because increasing the student population results in larger class sizes, less personalized time between students and professors, and more work for the students overall as we try to “weed them out”.
And don’t even get me started on how we keep telling students that their futures ride on their GPAs (perhaps my next drabble-rant will be called: “the GPA – a load of bullcrap that convinces growing minds that their self-worth depends on an institutionalized number”). In case there are any students out there, if you take nothing else from this post, please remember this: you are more than your GPA, and prospective bosses, graduate directors, and professional school administrators ultimately care about your experience the most (disclaimer: no, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take your classes seriously or fail them; I’m simply saying that the algorithm for “future success” is much more complex than just the GPA).
The point is, we need to talk about this more. The expectation of mental illness in academia is absurd. We should be emphasizing self-care tactics, time-management skills, and overall positive health tips for our students instead of trying to “weed them out” and see how much stress they can handle before they break.
A very frustrated future professor that is tired of watching her students deteriorate
