If you are coming to your PhD with a pre-existing mental health condition or you develop mental health issues during it, you may be using psychiatric medication as part of your treatment. Some meds will affect your concentration, energy, etc. more than others.

For me personally, being on sertraline (antidepressant) was no problem as I didn’t experience any side effects, but being on quetiapine (antipsychotic) was a bit challenging. Quetiapine affected my concentration, memory and energy levels and as a result I had to find ways to deal with these side effects. So here are some of the things I found helpful.

Energy levels

One of my main issues was lack of energy from quetiapine. There were days when I was so tired and my brain was in a fog that I wasn’t able to do any work, some days I’d manage a whole day and often only half a day/few hours. This created a lot of problems for me in the beginning because it was difficult for me to accept that I have limitations. So I was constantly frustrated that I couldn’t work like other people and often couldn’t make it into the office (and worked from home). Then I would get depressed about this and procrastinate for days or weeks, which would in turn make me feel very guilty. It was a vicious cycle.

In my final year I realised that if I continue this way I will never finish the PhD, it was torture. So I had to decided to either quit the PhD or find a way to work differently. I did the latter (although quitting is sometimes the right option). I started working when I was able to, not when I should. This meant that I did as much work as I could when I could. Some days this was literally half an hour, sometimes a few hours, and some days I did no wor. I was often feeling more sedated in the morning so I often did work in the afternoon/evening. Finally, if I needed to, I had a “weekend” during the week, and then made up the time working on the weekend (if I was able to). As my supervisor once said – even if you do 10 minutes of work per day it all adds up. And it really does!

So once I stopped forcing myself to work in the “traditional” way and started listening to my mind and body I managed to do enough work to finally submit my PhD 11 months later. Yes it took a bit longer to finish this was but I did finish in the end.

Concentration

Concentration is kind of related to energy levels. The more tired I was the less I could concentrate. Therefore, I did what most people do – had coffee and took frequent breaks.

As relaxation I also played games on my phone which were marketed as improving memory and concentration. One app that had useful games was Peak. I don’t know whether this really helped, or it was a placebo effect but at least I had a bit of fun.

Memory

Issues with my memory were also a struggle for me (especially the longer I was on quetiapine). In particular, I had issues with retaining new information (e.g. I would read a paper and a few hours later wouldn’t be able to remember anything from it, or I had trouble remembering and recalling names of authors). I also developed a slight issues with spelling where I started to spell certain words phonetically (i.e. how they sound) instead of how they were written (something I had never done before).

This was quite frustrating and it was something that I mainly had to accept, but I also found practical ways to help myself. I had a different notebook for different areas of my research and would write notes (also using colours helped me). In addition, I had sheets of paper (or you can use Excel) with summaries of certain research areas (e.g. every relevant author, publication year, key word for topic, number of participants, key words for the method).

As I was approaching my viva, I was worried that my memory might have a negative impact on the outcome, in particular the issue with remembering names and years (I did not want my external examiner to think that I didn’t know the main people or studies in my field). Since I had a great internal examiner who was aware of my mental health issues, I decided to tell her about my memory issues. She was very supportive, and with my permission also told the external, and they allowed me extra time to remember or look up information if I couldn’t remember it.