Inhibition of Graduate Productivity: The Mental Health Problem

"So far so good!" said the jumper as he fell past the 15th floor."

As a scientist and scientific writer, I feel like this whole introduction should be full of references supporting and illustrating the things I'm about to tell you, but this post is hard enough to write as it is, so I'm going to leave verifying the things I'm about to tell you as an exercise to the reader.  It should be relatively easy.  You just have to search "grad student" and "mental health" to find page after page of results, including articles published in Nature, Neuron, and the Chronicles of Higher Ed just to name a few recennt ones.  

Graduate students as a population have much worse mental health than the population as a whole.  This was true even before the pandemic, and while it's difficult to tell if the pandemic has had a greater effect on us than it has on other vulnerable populations, it has had a detrimental effect.  To be honest with you, grad school has, in ways, all the hallmarks of a toxic and abusive relationship.  Even with the best and most well meaning advisors, your livelihood, wellbeing, and entire future are dependent upon the good will of essentially one individual.  What that individual demands of you is all that maters in your professional word.  And often, toxic habits get passed on.  The abuse one person survives as a student can become the abuse one passes on, even unintentionally, as an advisor.  My own advisor has a story they like to tell.  They'll say "When I was in grad school, my supervisor once said to me "don't ever tell me you're tired."  The idea being that the supervisor had a huge number of responsibilities and work of their own.  they managed that, so how could their student possibly complain about being tired compared to what they do.  My advisor says they don't want to be like their old boss, and yet they have told me that exact story so many times, that they might as well be saying those words to me.  And its true, my advisor is very busy.  We're a large lab, several projects, multiple grants, my advisor is also a program director and has many other responsibilities aside, along with a two kids at home.  They are an extremely busy individual.  I should note here that my advisor makes roughly 7x what I make for the work they do.  Not that this is in any way relevant to hours worked or effort put in.  

It is possible to change advisors and labs.  Sometimes lately I have wondered if that is something I myself should do.  But doing so doesn't come without cost.  A PhD isn't just a job, it's about completing a specific project.  Imagine if every time you changed jobs, walking away from one exploitative lab to another means walking away from every inch of progress you have already made towards your degree.  Everything you've done, everything you've gained and sacrificed is gone and meaningless.  Sometimes that's what you have to do to survive, but it comes at its own terrible cost.  

So far, I find that all I've done in this post is ramble on about toxic work environments and difficult supervisors.  I'm sure that if you've gotten this far you're wondering what on earth this has to do with mental health?  The answer, unfortunately, is everything.  See, I'm really struggling with my mental health, specifically with a concept called "executive function."  It is, in short, the ability to sit down, decide to do a task, and then stick with it and do it.  A lot of things can impact executive function: depression, anxiety, ASD, and the thing I most strongly suspect is my problem, ADHD just to name a few.  It means sitting down to do something, and no matter how much you want to do it, how important it is, you just stare at the screen and the work and the focus just won't come.  It's the mental equivalent of having a tapeworm, where you can eat and eat but still not get the nutrients you need.  I can struggle and strive and pour everything that I have and am into my work and still barely get anything to show out of it.  

I've told my boss I'm struggling with this.  I told them I am seeking help.  But I'm not just gonna be magically better, and my boss refuses to understand or accept this.  Why could you do this yesterday and not today?  I thought we were past this?  Didn't you find a solution to that already?  Every backslide is challenged as a failing on my part, and my boss treats me like I'm lazy, like I don't care.  At a recent meeting, they gave me a condescending speech about growth is difficult and sometimes work requires sacrificing the things we want, as though I haven't sacrificed nearly everything in my life, everything that I used to do and love and enjoy, nearly every moment of free time I have just to keep my head above water and that bastard turns around and treats me like some child who doesn't understand the meaning of hard work.  My advisor, who I truly believe at least thinks they have my best interests at heart, absorbed this toxic trait of equating output with effort, and expecting whatever effort is necessary.  They cannot seem to understand that my lack of output is not a lack of effort, they refuse to see the work, and the hours I have put in outside the context of what end result I have to show them each week, and they will not accept that I am working and running as hard as I possibly can, because they refuse to even accept, cannot even comprehend what it is to struggle with your own mind just to get the most basic things accomplished.  

And so, I am seeing a psychiatrist on Monday.  I'm hoping to get diagnosed, and then medicated.  I'm hoping that it works for me the way it does for so many other people whose stories of finally getting onto the proper meds I have read.  But still, I am afraid.  I know my self worth.  I know how hard I work.  I have pushed myself harder, and farther than I suspect my PI has any concept of.  I fight myself every single day.  Even to write this has been an 3 hour long battle with my own mind, to get these words out of my soul, through the narrow channel that is my mind right now, and onto this page.  But I am still afraid.  I still ask, in the dark secret corners of my mind: what if I'm just not enough?  Because those god damned canned speeches my PI likes to give, about how life is hard, about how you have to push harder and get through, those might be enough to get someone over a small hump, past a limit that they have never been forced to try and challenge.  But they are a death knell to someone who is doing all they can, who knows that there is nothing more for them to give, because they been there before, because they've broken against that limit.  At the end, those damn speeches make me ask myself this: what if it's just me?  What if I'm not enough, and never will be?  What if diagnosis and medication won't help?  What if there's just nothing to diagnose?  What if, for everything I am and everything I can do, I'm just not enough and never will be?  I hate my advisor for bringing those questions to light, and I hate myself for not being able to do more and be better, and I am so very scared that this is all I will ever, all that I can ever be.  

There is no joke or happy ending here.  This is the reality of grad school.  Or, at the very least, this is MY reality in grad school.  7th floor, 6th floor, 5th floor.  So far, so good.  

Faxe MacAran

Update: 11/30/22
As I came back to this blog nearly a year later, I saw this post at the top, and felt I absolutely had to add that if you found anything in this relatable, you should absolutely check out Managing Your Mental Health During Your PhD: A Survival Guide by the fantastic Dr. Zoë J. Ayres