One of my recent tweets resonated with a lot of people. 

Not everyone can ‘thrive and survive’ their PhD. Some people just survive. If that’s you, there’s nothing wrong with you. It’s the system.

There are a number of systemic issues that prevent PhD student from thriving, and often make it difficult to even survive. In this blog post, I’ve decided to focus on programme structure, workspace, loneliness and mental health as four systemic areas that made it difficult for me to thrive during my PhD. 

Lack of structure

When I did a PhD, my programme did not have a lot of structure. In the first year we had one elective data analysis workshop and that was it for the rest of the degree. There were other workshops you could go to, but nothing was mandatory. In addition, we had one progression point in second year. All of this was not enough for me to feel like my programme had structure to it, and for most of it I felt completely lost and struggled to motivate myself. 

Since then, my Department has introduced a bit more structure in the form of yearly progression points and more PhD events on offer. I definitely think this is a step in the right direction. I believe that PhD students would struggle less with loneliness and motivation if the programmes in the UK (from my understanding it’s a lot more structured in the U.S. and some other countries) had a more job-like structure to them. This would include some mandatory courses as well as more frequent progression and feedback points. 

Workspace

Connected to the point above, when I did my PhD not every student was able to have a dedicated workspace. Considering PhD students are supposed to spend up to 8 hours working (as people in other jobs), it is very difficult to do that if you need to find a new desk every time. This also means you cannot leave any of your stuff at university but rather have to carry it with you every day which is impractical (let’s say you’re reading several book chapters at the same time and need to carry these around in addition to your laptop, etc.). 

Not having a workspace is also not conducive to building a community and combating loneliness. When there is a dedicated area for PhD students, this allows people to connect by, for example, eating lunch together or sharing advice.

Loneliness

As mentioned above, loneliness is a huge problem among PhD students in large part due to lack of structure, dedicated workspace and targeted events. Having a designated area where PhDs can work is one step towards combating loneliness but is by no means enough. Both departments and the university have a role to play here. Departments should organise dedicated events for their PhD students to help them develop both professionally and personally. 

My Department has regular events at which peers can present their research to each other but has also in recent years introduced well-being and mental health events which are invaluable. However, I believe that peer events are not enough, and PhD students need to be better integrated and connected with staff. This would go a long way in bridging this divide between PhD students and staff and help PhD students with professional and career development. But this would also help with a sense of belonging. At present, PhD students in the UK often don’t fully fit with the student population (as they usually are older and have different priorities) but they also don’t fully fit with staff as they are not considered staff (despite the fact that they often teach and work closely with staff members in the department). This further leads to PhD students feeling misplaced and lonely. 

Access to mental health support

For me, as a person with a serious mental illness, access to mental health support (or the lack of thereof) was crucial. When I started my PhD, my mental health took a big hit for a number of reasons some of which are of course personal and down to me (I’ve written about this in previous posts), but how bad things got is also in large part due to the fact that it took me more than a year to receive proper support. 

First, a lot of the mental health support that universities provide is primarily geared towards undergraduate students, and very often doesn’t even begin to meet the needs of PhD students (who are usually older and have altogether different issues than undergraduate students). However, universities very often use the existing support to show that they are good at offering mental health support, although this support is underused by PhD student because it’s not appropriate. 

This support often comes in forms of workshops such as ‘how to manage your exam anxiety’ or ‘how to manage your time’. Most PhD students don’t have exams but do have different types of anxiety, and most PhD students know how to manage their time to some extent because they’ve already got through and UG and MA degrees. We need workshops that will focus on PhD-specific aspects of issues such as anxiety and time management. 

Second, at least in York the NHS mental health support is very underfunded and patchy. Very often, the NHS will use the fact that the university provides some mental health support to discharge students to their care, without considering that university mental health services are not there to provide ongoing mental health support beyond academic issues. This is the reason why I was not able to get to a psychiatrist for over a year and my illness spiralled out of control. My GP made a referral several times, but it was rejected. It was not until I was in crisis, that I was seen by NHS professionals. 

Although this kind of support is not the responsibilities of universities, they do, however, have many students with mental illness and disabilities and should campaign and work more closely with the city councils to improve NHS mental health support. 

Considering how many PhD students suffer from poor mental health to the point of just surviving, and with now more and more research supporting this, universities need to have a holistic look at the PhD programmes they provide. For a title that is associated with both professional and personal development like no other, it is not enough to survive, we should also thrive.