Link: Hyperbole and a Half

I have been reluctant to post this because I assume everybody will have seen it.  But everybody will only see it if everybody cross posts it.  So here goes.

This is remarkable: "Depression Part Two" at Hyperbole and a Half".   Warning: like many links from here you might not find it a comfortable read since it has a lot about the inside of feeling depressed and some discussion of suicidal feelings.

I particularly empathise with the line "I don't necessarily want to kill myself, I just want to become dead somehow."  Though I don't want to kill myself, the thought of not being around can be quite comforting.  That is even though - as now - things are going quite well and I am only rarely miserable.

Link: The Elephant in the Room: The Stigma Around Mental Health

The Elephant in the Room: The Stigma Around Mental Health is an excellent article by a young student at Huffington Post Students UK.  

This post happens to be by a relative of a friend of mine, but that's just how it came to my attention on facebook.  It focusses on the difficulties of being diagnosed with depression as a young person, both medical and family.  

One of the points she picks up on is the problems caused by the multiple meanings of the word depressed, which I've also blogged about.  At least on this blog, I try to use a word like "dispiriting" instead of "depressing" if I mean the non-medical type of depressing: e.g. "Getting a paper rejected is dispiriting."

In site news, there's not been a lot of posts recently. I can't speak for Mikael but for me that's generally a good sign. I haven't been feeling depressed but also have had a cough which has slowed me down.  The good side of the cough is that I have had a lot of seriously serious naps.  Yesterday my naps were an hour, 20 minutes, and two hours.  Lovely.

It's Ok Not To Be Ok

The ever wonderful Keelium pointed out this post by Miri on facebook, saying 

"Seriously good shit. Read immediately. As someone who has spent the same decade (14 to 24 for me though) learning from depression, I'm with Miri 100%."

Miri talks about making life decisions - including not doing a PhD - based in part on how it will affect her depression.  She makes the excellent point that if somebody has bad knees, nobody criticises them for not running a marathon.  The same should apply if your mental health precludes certain areas of activity.

image credit: Miri

Moving post on "Moving On" by Keelium

A very moving post yesterday Moving On by Keelium.

Some warning though: it could upset you.

It talks about many sides of depression in academia from a grad student's point of view.  How being ill makes it difficult to perform in a overworking culture, how this can lead to the termination of studies, this in turn of course causing health problems, and then all this can be brought back to you much later out of the blue.

Link: It’s not you, it’s a disease

Just came across another excellent article, because it was quoted by John Belcher's.

This one is in the MIT Newspaper "The Tech" by Grace Taylor.

"I want to tell you the story of how I became such a big fan of mental health treatment." 

"So if feeling bad is your baseline, if you haven’t had an awesome day since high school, or if you don’t think you can talk to your friends about how you’re feeling, please consider talking to someone who actually knows what they’re talking about. I didn’t believe in therapy or medication when I started, but that didn’t stop them from changing my life."

• MENS ET TENEBRAE: It’s not you, it’s a disease, Grace Taylor, The Tech (MIT), April 10, 2012

It reminds me of the story of the scientist who had a lucky horseshoe on his wall.  When challenged why when he didn't believe in superstitions, he said "Ahh, but I heard it works even if you don't believe in it."

So even if you don't believe in it, read Grace's words and consider investigating therapy or medication.   Unlike horseshoes, it does work for some of the people some of the time.

Links: Two for the price of one.

Found two excellent links today:

First, excellent article by John Belcher on his depression. He is Professor of Physics at MIT: IN GOOD COMPANY: With tenure but not without troubles.  For example:

"I am no doctor, but I do recognize the symptoms of depression. If a student comes to me with troubles of any kind, I always tell them to go to S3 or Mental Health. In case depression is the cause of the trouble, I also share with them that I have been clinically depressed and am on Prozac, and that there is no shame in that."

Second, a blog post not mainly about depression, but about encouraging a community in the PL world - which is not explicitly stated but I think means the Programming Language research community.

It's by Chris Martens and called How to create the PL culture I'd like to believe we deserve. It focusses on a lot of things, like use of inclusive language for example, but has this segment:

"4. Understand and discuss atypical brain function. One way to put this point is: stop valuing your colleagues on the basis of how "smart" you think they are, through e.g. how quickly they can solve a problem you put forth or how long it takes them to grasp a point from a paper or talk. Another thing I'm saying with this is that depression in academia is super common, yet we never talk about it; compounding situations like PTSD are less common yet can be totally crippling in combination with depression and the concomitant taboo/lack of sympathy for anyone who's not at least high-functioning with their atypicality. In fact perhaps we just expect that everyone in academia is "a little bit crazy", which means that a) we have some uniform idea of what that means and how it affects everyone (everyone responds to stress with workaholism, right?) and b) we don't talk about it at all, or what we could be doing to help each other, because we just think it's an inevitable part of the ride."

But this article overall  speaks to me: for non Computer Scientists it might be shocking, but it's probably true that the majority of people in the field are White, Male, Straight, Full Time, Not Mentally or Physically Disabled.   Put all that (and a few more probably majorities) together and it means we are not great at welcoming people who aren't like us.  I mean officially we are: but that doesn't mean we are in real life, since throwaway comments or working assumptions can make life unpleasant for others.

Link: Mental Illness Can Be An Advantage, in a sense, with caveats

I've just come across this article from about 3 and a half years ago:

• "For some academic researchers, mental illness can be an advantage", The Guardian, August 25, 2009.

It has the very encouraging subhead "Users of mental-health services are increasingly being recruited as academic researchers".

The context is that people who have experience of being the users of mental health services can be employed as researchers to research the user experience.  This seems to be a wholly positive thing. 

I do think there are some caveats though.  First, it applies only to this rather specialised field of academia, but to be fair that is right in the article title ("some academic researchers.")  Maybe more seriously, I noticed this paragraph:

"Huge cultural shifts need to happen within departments in order for academics employed because of their diagnosis to be made entirely welcome, observes Kati Turner, who has a long history of borderline personality disorder and depression, but is now well and working as a service-user researcher at St George's, University of London."

It seems dispiriting that this has to be said in what you would think would be the most welcoming environment for people with mental health issues in academia.

Related links:

• Kati Turner, now Executive Director of ... 
• Emergence, not mentioned  in the article but says about itself: 




"Our vision at Emergence is to make a life changing difference for everyone affected by personality disorders (PD) through support, advice and education. This site is just one way we plan to achieve that. We hope you will find our website not only inspiring but informative and supportive whatever your involvement with personality disorder."

• Debbie Mayes, researcher at Lancaster, including a list of articles she has written about the topic.
• The Spectrum Centre for Mental Health Research
• SURE: Service User Research Enterprise, King's College London

Request For Links and Resources on Returning to Work for Barry

I've been approached by Barry (not his real name) to ask the community for any help.

Barry has been on medical leave from his academic job due to depression, and is starting to worry about going back to work, especially because the stress of the teaching and other academic activities seemed to contribute to him being too sick to carry on.

Barry wrote: "The reason I'm writing this is that I'm wondering whether you know of any standards or guidelines for return-to-work accommodation for mentally disabled academics."  (Note that "accommodation" here does not mean somewhere to live, but allowances such as reducing teaching load or similar.)  

Obviously if anybody has any pointers, please comment or if you prefer send to us to pass on anonymously or not as you wish.

A couple of closing thoughts.

Barry didn't explicitly ask but people might have their own personal stories and they might be of value.  In fact, that is what this blog is largely about: in fact I am very conscious that we are not well placed to give advice as non-medics. A personal story is just that, a story.

I do know who Barry is and from a quick Google I have to say I admire some of the things he's done. Another example of both sides of the academic/depressive story: you can do high impact and important work while depressed; and the fact that you can do it doesn't stop you being vulnerable to serious depression.

Good luck Barry!

p.s. I wanted to use a name and gender to make writing easier. To avoid confusion I just used the first name and gender from the list of hurricane names for 2013. I tossed a coin to decide man or woman, and the first male in 2013 was Barry.  From now on, the next few pseudonyms will be  Chantal, Dorian, Erin, and so on.

Update: 21 March

Here are some relevant links at least for some English speaking countries where it was easy for me to search.   Even if Barry lives in one of these I don't know if they will be relevant or helpful, but I wanted to put them up also for everyone.   I should mention though that these are all general, not in any way related to academia.  Of course Universities and similar are large enough organisation that they will always be required to obey these rules and should have staff whose job it is to implement them.

• UK: Returning to work after mental health issues
• USA: Americans With Disabilities Act
• Canada: A Place for All: A Guide to Creating an Inclusive Workplace
• Australia: National Mental Health and Disability Employment Strategy

In general terms, the themes seem to be that employers must make "reasonable adjustments" or "reasonable accommodations" for mentally disabled staff, and it seems like that should include people returning to work.   

PTSD in academia

An internet friend of mine recently posted this meditation on PTSD and the ways it influences their research activities. Suffice to say: if your brain suddenly goes on leave for a few days, and obliterates any short-term memory for you, it's hard and requires conscious strategies to keep up projects that take a long time to bring around.

http://typeintype.wordpress.com/2013/03/11/research-ptsd/

The post also articulates how utterly petrifying it can be to try and talk about these issues when an early-career academic. Me, I just hope that nothing I write here will be immediately disqualifying when a hiring committee decides on my potential as a candidate. My friend points out that writing candidly about their experiences may just potentially obliterate their career — when future employers find the text and read it.

We need to be able to take care of our members.
I have no idea how to combine this with the reality of the academic job market.

Link: Bipolar and Academia

A guest post on Bipolar and Academia from The Professor Is In

Toolbox for depressed perfectionists

Keelium writes about some cognitive tricks that work for her to break out of mental loops, depressed moods and perfectionist hangups. I'll give a condensed list here, using her headings, but go there and read the entire piece! It's worth it.

Let hard things be hard.Believe in the power of ritual.Go somewhere.Help someone else.Check SOMETHING off your list, no matter how small.When all else fails, bake brownies.Call in the professionals.

Some of these things, I know I don't do enough myself; I could use more rituals myself. Other things, I have already run across as useful mental hacks: for instance, whenever I feel the improductivity-guilt gearing up, it is useful to remind myself that I am indeed one of the best people in the world at what I do, and that I have heard several grad students point out that they use me as their role model.

Srsly. Depressed me should listen more to the grad students who want to be me.

List of Resources from The Professor Is In

The Professor Is In (Karen L Kelsky) has compiled a list of resources on Academia and Mental Illness.

This looks like an extremely useful list and we'd like to thank her for compiling it.

Coping with schizophrenia in academia

A law professor writes in the NY Times about combining a fulfilling and challenging academic career with hallucinatory schizophrenia.

Vignette: Alone in a crowd

Valerie Aurora writes on suicides, and on the torrent of well-meaning advice that comes in its wake.

Read the blog post. She writes eloquently and with personal insight on how much of the advice that shows up — “Remember all those who love you”, or “Just TALK to someone” — can be counter-productive, even exacerbating a bad situation for some depression sufferers.

She also writes concretely on things that do help:

• Reducing the stigma of mental illnesses — this, by the way, is the main reason I write in this blog, the main reason I speak out as an academic with a mental illness. If we are invisible, how will anyone else realize they are not alone?
• Share information on trained assistance.
• Support and push for research into prevention and treatment.

There are things that Valerie describes that touch concretely on my own experiences.

Less than a week before I actually got started on my current treatment, I had a bad dream. It sounds oh so trite when I describe it now, but what I remembered from it when waking up was that my mother was disappointed in me. My brother was upset that I had not kept a promise. And my wife was disappointed in me.

So there I was. Awake. Sad. Upset. Weighed down by the accumulated disappointments. Well aware that these were things that happened in a dream, that had no concrete relationship to my family. My wife slept right next to me — but rather than reaching out, talking to her, seeking her comfort, I grew disgusted with myself. I was convinced the dream disappointment carried over to the real woman, and could not conceive of her tolerating my presence. So I sneaked out of bed. Cried for about half an hour before I could pull myself together well enough to get dressed and put on clothes. Barely managed to convince myself it was really a dream, and was not related to the real world.

Then she woke up. Overslept by well over an hour from what she expected to sleep. Her first words were

“But why did you not wake me up when you got out of bed?”

…and I just cracked.

…

She is my loving, supporting wife. She will drop everything to bring me back down to earth. And while I knew this even at the depth of my distress, I could not for the life of me remember the immediate implication: if only I were to talk to her, everything would have gotten better. Earlier. “Just talk to someone” does not help as advice here: I knew it. I thought of it as I was fighting with my own anguish. And it did not help me actually reach out, actually talk to anyone.

“The common thread among people who commit suicide is that they are suicidal.”

Remembering Aaron by taking care of each other

And what I learned was that this view is wrong. Suicide is no more a heightened reaction to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune than depression is just being extra sad. Most of us won’t kill ourselves, no matter how bad things get. The common thread among people who commit suicide is that they are suicidal.

The blog post itself discusses the perspective of protecting the depressed members of the hacker community; but there are many parallels from the hacker community to the academic community.

It can be difficult to ask for help

Astrophysicist Peter Coles blogs about post-traumatic stress and asking for help.

What not to say to someone with depression

This post is just a link to an excellent post on an unrelated blog with this title.

Since many depressed academics don't like to talk about depression, and especially don't like to tell people they have it, it's an issue many of us face.   Many of these responses chime with me, but I think perhaps the one that might be more specialist in academia is "Oh, that's interesting, tell me about it!" since academics are interested in stuff.   Not sure whether that is a good thing or a bad thing.

I'll just quote the first paragraph and send you on your way:

I’ve come to the conclusion that most people who have never experienced depression have no idea how to react when I tell them I have a mental illness. They either look away and change the subject, or say some infuriating things. I often bite my tongue to hold back my honest replies. Here is a compilation of my ‘favourites’, and the things I would love to say back but daren’t:

The Melancholic Mummy: What Not To Say To Someone With Depression

Some resources ...

An old friend just contacted me with some links, and I want to share them.  They are more or less UK centric but they may well have links of international interest.   The first is a UK charity specifically targetting people in post-16 education who may be having problems.

• Recourse,  a UK charity, which describes itself as "The only charity providing practical and emotional support to staff in FE & HE. Free, confidential Support Line: 0808 802 02 03." Obviously that's a UK number, but there are resources on the web site which may be useful for other locations. 
• Recourse are on twitter as @RecourseCharity

The following links are not specifically academic and even more geographically limited (Scotland) but if people are looking for help they might be useful.

• http://www.breathingspacescotland.co.uk
• http://www.smhfa.com
• http://www.scottishrecovery.net

Thanks very much for these links.  Of course putting these links here is no endorsement of these sites and organisations.