My long awaited literature review (long awaited by me anyway) Prospects and pitfalls of extending the National Student Survey to postgraduate students: an international review is now available on the Brighton CLT website (open access).
Monthly Archives: March 2014
Mental health in academia
This post has been inspired by a couple of recent posts on the Guardian Higher Education Network website. It represents my thought and experiences. If it helps others I welcome that.
The growing awareness of mental health in academia is to be welcomed. I had my own experience of ‘coming out’ about my depression to myself, my doctor, my family, friends and colleagues. In accordance with stereotypical male behaviour I tried to avoid ‘bothering’ the doctor for at least two or three years. I was worried that I would be labelled ‘a hypochondriac’, or worse still be put on strong medication which would render me unable to function at work and in life generally. I feared a treatment worse than the disease.
Even after starting treatment I didn’t tell anyone what was going on. The only people who knew to start with were my wife and my doctor. After a few months of taking medication (which actually got working quite quickly) I wrote about my depression on my blog. Lots of people supported me and wished me well—family, friends, colleagues, strangers even. Several friends, mostly men my sort of age (late 30s), wrote to me about their own experiences. In many cases they too had hidden it from others.
One thing I’ve learnt in the past couple of years is that we seem to be talking about mental health problems a lot more. This might be due to my experience heightening my awareness, but this particular emphasis on mental health academia intrigues me. In my experience mental health struggles cross barriers of gender, class, religion, ethnicity, sexuality and occupation. Are academics really more prone to mental health problems than lorry drivers, builders, shop assistants, professional footballers, insurance brokers, nurses, unemployed people, elderly people, stay-at-home mums and dads etc.? Or are people with mental health problems somehow attracted to academic careers?
The Guardian Higher Education Network pieces seem to suggest that mental health problems in academia are worse than other professions or that academia is some sort of special case. Perhaps academia attracts people with mental health problems. These questions are beyond my expertise, so I default to my own experience here: As I came to contemplate the possibility of an academic career in the final year of my undergraduate degree I looked to academia as a higher calling. I saw what I believed was a highly ethical occupation where people respected each other, a true meritocracy where the best rose to the top, and nobody resented it. Maybe not the not paid job, certainly not the worst and an opportunity to live the life of the mind. 11 years post-PhD I now see that academia is a real job in the real world. I still regard it a special privilege, but I don’t see it so much as an exalted calling now.
Perhaps we also expect a community of thousands of people committed to critical thought in their respective fields of study to be a more supportive and understanding environment than other workplaces. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.
Some, but not all the reasons behind my own depression related to my previous job. The last two years of that job were turbulent for reasons beyond my own influence or that of any of my immediate colleagues. My full time job become part time but the workload only seemed to increase. I took on more and more in the hope I could work my way out of the situation. I reassured myself that anyone who was not overburdened wasn’t working hard enough. Eventually I began to recognise that a change was necessary if anything was going to change. Having stabilised my health I was able to re-enter the job market and now have a job I am happy in and doing the sorts of things I’ve long wanted to do. It is not a weakness to look for opportunities elsewhere if the present situation isn’t working.
The only regret I have now is not seeing the doctor sooner. I regret visiting the doctor for other ‘physical’ ailments and not telling him/her what was going in my mind. Here’s my only direct piece of advice: Doctors are not mind readers. If you are feeling depressed, anxious, afraid or suicidal you need to tell them. Don’t be too proud to get help. I’m still on the medication – I don’t know how long for – but seeking professional help has brought me to a much better place in every area of my life.
Another test of the WpProQuiz plugin
PASS Leader test 1
becoming a PASS leader at the University of Brighton
PASS stands for Peer Assisted Study Sessions. PASS sessions are usually attached to an individual first year module. A PASS session takes place on a regular basis (for example once a week). PASS sessions appear on the university timetable, but they are not taught by university staff like lectures, seminars or laboratory sessions. PASS sessions are led by student leaders. If the module takes place in the first year, the PASS leaders are usually second or third year students who have taken (and passed) the module before. Lecturers and other university staff do not usually attend PASS sessions.
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Hybrid Pedagogy: a different sort of journal
Developer, Financier, Designer: Building Hybrid Projects outside the University documents and reflects on my experiences of building the open access website YazikOpen. The article focuses more on the processes and issues about conducting a project outside the ‘official’ university than the technicalities of building the website, on modern languages or on the open access debate.
I wish to encourage others (in and out of academia) to take a look at the Hybrid Pedagogy online journal. I wanted to write this piece for some time, but was unsure where I could find an outlet to publish it. In my experience traditional journals don’t tend to be good outlet for reflective pieces, so I took to google and found out about Hybrid Pedagogy. Knowing nothing about the journal beyond what I saw on the website I took the plunge and submitted a short piece for consideration.
Hybrid Pedagogy is not only different in the sorts of article it publishes. Its peer review process is different from other journals I’ve published in. Rather than getting comments from anonymous reviewers, two editors from the journal, Sean Morris and Chris Friend, worked with me to bring the piece up to a publishable standard. They made suggestions, asked questions, asked me to expand certain sections and said what they thought was interesting about the piece and what they thought its shortcomings to be.
Hybrid Pedagogy is not only an open access online journal, but a different method of publication altogether. I would urge those with an interest in pedagogy or pedagogic research to take a serious look at the articles and consider contributing. There is even a section called 'Page Two' for non-peer reviewed contributions.