Author: Jelena

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.  

Over time, I’ve seen quite a few tweets from people asking whether one should do a PhD in their 30s and what it is like. I personally am of the opinion that it is never too late for education, including a PhD, and when it came to me making a decision to do one at the age of 29 it did not even occur to me that I might be ‘too old’. However, at that time I was single and without children, so the decision seemed a lot simpler. Nevertheless, there are a few things I learned along the way about doing a PhD from the age of 29 until 35 (yes it took me 6 years to finish) that I’d like to share with you.

Let’s start with the positives!

The major benefit of starting a PhD at 29 was that I was more mature – it’s a fairly obvious one I know, but in hindsight it was important. It meant that I (mostly) knew what I wanted and why I was doing a PhD. I had already tried other careers and was quite certain that a career in academia would be a good long-term fit for me and I was not wrong.

Also, because I had had a career before starting this degree, I had work experience which helped me not only with the PhD itself but also in the work I was doing alongside the PhD. I was self-funded which meant that I had to work part-time, and in my first year I worked as supply teacher in secondary schools; a job I was able to get thanks to my previous teaching qualifications. Later when I started working as a teaching assistant in my Department, the teaching qualification and experience also came in very handy. My previous work experience helped me build a profile for myself as a reliable and effective employee, which in turn helped me find employment after the PhD. This is, of course, not to say that if you don’t have work experience you won’t be a reliable employee, but rather that in my case I noticed it as a benefit.

I was more confident too as a lot of the insecurities about my looks and persona that I had in my teens and early 20s were mostly gone by 29. I felt right in my own skin, if that makes sense. Previous work experience in a job that I loved also enabled me to find out what I was good at and what were my potential weaknesses, which helped me in my PhD when it came to e.g., picking a topic or deciding on the methodology. Knowing who I was and being overall quite confident was also important in the fight against the imposter syndrome, which like with most people kicked in for me too. At those times it was useful to be able to remind myself that there were other things I was good at and that no matter what happened with the PhD that wouldn’t change. 

Although when you start your academic career later in life it means that some of your colleagues who are younger or the same age as you might be further along in their careers, don’t let that bother you. I personally find my own Department to be rather diverse in terms of staff ages and when people made a start in academia and that’s great. I found it rather refreshing that I was given the choice to completely change my career and start a PhD at 29 and that has never been an issue for me in terms of age or being ‘a late starter’.

Nevertheless, there were some negatives too which are worth sharing and considering. 

Overall, I think my previous career was a big help during the PhD but having had a job/career before also meant that it was fairly difficult to adjust to the PhD way of life/work as it is a lot less structured and with a lot less accountability to other people. I really missed having co-workers and meaningful deadlines, and it took me quite a while to figure out what routine worked best for me. Finding a routine also meant getting back into being a student again and all that this entails, like reading and writing academic papers, improving my concentration and sitting long hours at a desk. It had been a while since I did all that for my BA and MA, but eventually I got the hand of it.

Another important consideration are finances. I personally went from having a decent and steady salary to spending my savings on my PhD and working multiple part-time jobs. This is a bit different if you are funded, but even then the stipends are usually not large enough to allow for comfortable living. I would say that in most cases, the PhD years will mean living on a tighter budget. Especially, if you are coming from a well-paid and steady job, you may find this change in your financial circumstances a bit tough. 

I guess a fairly important consideration when starting a PhD later in life is family, whether you already have one or you are planning for one. I personally left family planning until after I finished my PhD and found a job, as I found it too much to be thinking about both at the same time. However, I know of many PhD colleagues who have had a baby during the PhD or started the PhD with children.  

What I want to say at the end of this post is that regardless of at what age you start your PhD, it will come with its unique challenges. However, none of these challenges are unsurmountable, especially if you are reasonably prepared for them and know what to expect. As I said at the start, I don’t believe that one is ever too old to do a PhD so if that’s what you really want to do, go for it!

“I always used to be a confident person but during the PhD my self-confidence was shattered and now I constantly doubt myself and my abilities. I miss the person I used to be. Now it’s time to rebuild my confidence again.”

This is a tweet I posted a few days ago and so far over 2k people have liked it, and numerous people got in touch with me to say that they have felt the same. It seems it’s a topic that hits very close to home for many PhDs. So, I have decided to write down what lead to me losing my confidence and what I am doing to try and get it back. It’s still a process for me, but I hope to get there eventually.

Problem #1

I hadn’t really failed at anything before the PhD. I always did well academically and straight after uni I became a teacher of English as a second language, a job that I was very good at. Over the next few years I was given more responsibilities and eventually promoted to the Director of Studies of the foreign languages school I was working for. So overall, most of my life I did things I was reasonably good at and did not have any big disappointments or failures either academically or at work (but plenty in personal life).

However, so much of the PhD experience is about receiving criticism and not knowing whether you are succeeding and this hit me so hard. I had to learn how to deal with criticism and separate it from myself.

Solution #1

Here are some of the strategies that helped me deal with criticism.

First, try to remember that the PhD is like an apprenticeship. You are learning to do research and it takes time and practice to gain the skills. You are not a failure if you don’t immediately do everything perfectly.

Second, it’s not personal. You are receiving criticism of your work, not of yourself as a person. Try to separate your work from yourself as much as possible.

Third, make time for yourself. It is important to treat the PhD like any other job and try to leave your work at the office so that you can dedicate the rest of your time to other things that are equally important in your life (like family, friends, hobbies).

If you want more tips on dealing with criticism see my previous blog post: https://phdmentalhealth.home.blog/2019/06/21/dealing-with-criticism/

Problem #2

I have always been an evidence-based person. This means that if I got enough positive feedback about something, I would conclude that it’s reasonable for me to feel confident about it. For example, I always got positive feedback for my teaching so over the years I became confident in my teaching abilities. This has allowed me to be quite realistic but also confident about myself. However, this strategy backfired massively during the PhD, because most of the evidence was pointing to the conclusion that I wasn’t very good at PhD work. The mistake I made was that this feedback was coming from very few sources.

Solution #2

Get your feedback from as many sources as possible. You supervisor is a very important source of feedback, but they are not and should not be the only source. Get out there – attend & present at conferences, ask questions, go to departmental events, etc.

Because of many difficult events in my life during the PhD, I did not have the opportunity to present my work at conferences until the last year of my PhD. But once I started going to conferences the feedback was quite positive, and this gave me a confidence boost. In addition, I wasn’t afraid to ask questions in other talks and this made me quite visible to other academics and is very good for networking. The same goes for posters, approach people and ask questions. This also gives you an opportunity to mention your work.

My department organises staff research talks were staff present their latest research, and both PhD students and staff can attend. I found such talks very useful as it gave me the opportunity to practice asking questions and talking to academics in a more informal setting.

Don’t underestimate the importance of student-led conferences and publications as such events give you a great opportunity to practice presenting and writing among peers. This is especially useful if you are quite anxious about presenting in public, or about your writing.

And finally, listen to the feedback from those outside of academia – to your friends and family. They can be a powerful reminder of who we really are.

Problem #3

At some point, probably in the second year of my PhD, my confidence in my academic abilities started declining, eventually hitting rock bottom, and as a result I never talked about my work let alone showcased it. But this was a big mistake! No matter how bad you think your work is, this is very unlikely to be true. So recently I started forcing myself to showcase my work more.

Solution #3

For example, I’ve had a ResearchGate profile for a while but always felt like I did not have anything to put on there and thought that conference presentations and posters weren’t worth adding to my profile. Recently, I changed my mind and started adding some of my work. It’s still a tough process for me but I’m glad I made a start. 

Finally, I’d like to mention something the lovely people of Twitter reminded me about: Remember you are so much more that your PhD, your work or academia. For many of us it is an important aspect of our lives, but it doesn’t define us.

1. It’s perfectly normal to feel like you have no idea what you’re doing.

Starting a PhD was a completely new experience for me, especially because I came to it later in life (around 28) after having had a job for a few years. The structure of a PhD is usually completely different to any job you have had – you are working on your own on one project for up to four years or more, your main point of contact is your supervisor and usually you don’t have fixed working hours. This means that you need to structure your own working day, while trying to make friends and figure out your research (and many students also work in addition to doing their PhDs). It’s a lot and no wonder many PhD students feel lost at the start.

Therefore, it is a good idea to try and use the first six months up to a year of your PhD as the adjustment period. Give yourself time and don’t punish yourself for feeling lost, it’s normal!

2. Everyone else feels lost too.

In my first year we had a department Christmas party for us PhD students in early December. Before that, when I asked a colleague about how their PhD was going they would tell me it’s all great and positive, and in response I would lie and say that everything was great for me too. But it wasn’t, I was struggling a lot and feeling lost but felt especially like a failure because all of my colleagues seemed to be doing great.

By the time of the Christmas party, I had gotten really tired of lying and for the first time I answered the question about how my PhD was going truthfully – it was not going well and I felt like I had no idea what I was doing. To my surprise every colleague that I was honest with said that they felt the same but were too afraid to admit it to others.

After that Christmas party we were all a lot more honest with each other about how we were doing and it really eased the pressure we were feeling to be perfect.

3. You don’t have to be perfect.

Think of the PhD as your apprenticeship during which you are learning how to conduct proper research. No one is born a researcher, it is a set of skills that are acquired, and they can’t be acquired over night. It takes time and patience.

I would advise you to set yourself realistic goals for each six months or year. If you are not sure what goals are realistic for your first year talk to your supervisor and colleagues. You can also consult your handbook, or online PhD communities (e.g., just type ‘PhD group’ into your Facebook search and you’ll get numerous groups to join, or if you prefer to use Twitter follow @AcademicChatter for example).

I spent the first six month mostly reading literature and felt like I was not doing enough and was just wasting my time, but it turned out that was exactly what I was supposed to be doing at the start.

Academia is a tough environment, partly because it entails being criticised a lot which can be very damaging for many people. You don’t only receive criticism during you PhD (mainly from your supervisor) but this continues well into your career and even seasoned academics are not immune to unnecessarily harsh comments on their written work from their peers.

Very often PhD supervisors (and peer reviewers) forget that there is a person behind the written work and that in order to create a good researcher you need to give praise as well as critique. Therefore, everyone in academia could afford to be more constructive in their criticism by pointing out the weak as well as strong aspects of a person’s work.

But in this post I’ll focus on constructive criticism, which is aimed at improving your work. Before I started my PhD I had never really failed at anything. I was always a good student and also did reasonably well at uni. Very early on I got a job as an English teacher, which I was very good at and received praise and promotion. This means that for most of my life I have not received a lot of criticism regarding my work. Therefore, when I first started to receive feedback on my written work from my supervisor, the critique came as a bit of a shock. I took it rather personally, and for a long time I felt like a failure. This led to a loss of motivation to do my work and essentially procrastination. At some point towards the end of my PhD I developed some strategies for dealing with this beast called criticism, which I will share in the rest of this post.

1) It’s an apprenticeship

People often come to the PhD thinking they should already know a lot. After all, by that point you will have usually been in education for a number of years and often will have had a successful career in a tangential field. But as my supervisor always used to say to me, the PhD is like an apprenticeship – you are learning how to be a researcher and it is natural that you work won’t be perfect to start with. The criticism of your works serves to help you develop your research and writing skills. Even if you have done academic writing before for you undergrad and master’s degrees, writing a thesis or a journal article is completely different and it takes time to develop these skills.

(At this point, I urge supervisors not to forget that pointing out the things your students is doing well is as important and useful as pointing out what needs improving!)

2) It’s not personal

The criticism is not personal, it does not reflect badly on you as a person and your self-worth. Please keep that in mind! It is a criticism of your work which you are still learning how to do properly. It is really important to separate your thesis (i.e. your work) from you as a person. This is particularly difficult to do with a PhD thesis because it feels like your baby in a way. You came up with the topic and you will be working on it intensely for at least four years. There are few other jobs that will make you this closely connected to your work.

But it’s important to remind yourself that at the end of the day it is a job, and and success or lack of thereof doesn’t reflect on you as a person.

3) Work stays in the office

Therefore, it is important to take steps to start treating your PhD as a job. If you can, try to set yourself working hours. It is also important to try to keep the weekends to yourself and to relax and/or do something pleasant. This also goes for holidays – you are entitled to holidays and make sure you book them throughout the year (and conferences are not a holiday!).

If you need to be more flexible with your time that’s fine but make sure you are still getting time off. For example, I wasn’t really able to work on a regular basis and according to working hours. So I worked when and how ever much I could, and this meant that sometimes I did work on the weekends. But to compensate for that I would have a day off during the week.

4) Reward yourself

When we submit a piece of work or meet a deadline, we don’t tend to see it as an accomplishment at all. In fact, we often feel guilty that it wasn’t better or that we didn’t do more. To counteract these feelings, make it a habit to reward yourself for every milestone in your PhD not matter how small. It might seem silly at first but you will eventually develop a very good habit. Your reward can be anything from a glass of wine, a meeting with friends or a holiday. We often forget things that makes us happy so it might be worth making a list of things that you can refer to when you want to do something nice for yourself.

Many people struggle with their mental health during their PhD, even if they have never experienced mental health difficulties before. There is something about the PhD experience that places specific demands on the students that tend to lead to the deterioration of mental health. In this post I will list some of those struggles/demands and relate them to my own experience. I will group the struggles according to what mental health issues they caused for me. 

Anxiety and feeling like a failure

Procrastination and imposter syndrome were the two struggles that most often led to me feeling anxious and like a failure. Many PhD students suffer from the imposter syndrome, and feel like they don’t really belong in academia and will be found out at any moment. This often leads to perpetual feeling of being a failure. The imposter syndrome is also partly systemic to academia, and the way PhD students are treated within the department/university.

Procrastination is a bit of a “chicken or egg” situation. It’s difficult to know whether it comes first or is a result of other feelings. For me procrastination was usually connected to feelings of guilt and anxiety. And because I did not want to deal with those uncomfortable feelings all the time, I procrastinated. But procrastinating made me feel even more guilty, so it turned into a vicious cycle.

Stress/pressure

Financial worries are a common struggle for many PhD students. There is a high proportion of students who are self-funded, and even those that do have funding sometimes struggle to make ends meet. As a result, many students have additional jobs, such as leading seminars in their department or a job external to the university. Struggling financially and having to work alongside your PhD can be very stressful and put a person under additional pressure.

I was self-funded and had to work during my PhD. My first year was the worst as I wasn’t able to get a teaching position in my department. Since I was a qualified teacher I worked as a supply teacher in secondary schools, which was exhausting and too demanding to do with a PhD. For the rest of my PhD I taught in my department, which was easier. However, I always felt like my PhD would have progressed faster if I hadn’t had to work so much.

Depressive symptoms

The PhD is highly unstructured compared to other forms of study or employment. You are mostly left to your own devices and have to manage your own time while there is very little accountability on a daily basis to anyone else but yourself. For me this was the worst, since I worked as a language teacher prior to my PhD and was very much used to structure and feeling useful and like I was contributing to other people’s lives. This also impacted my motivation as I often questioned why I was doing the PhD at all and who would really benefit from my research.

Burn out

Time management is often the cause of burn out among PhD students. You are either working too much or procrastinating and feeling guilty. Additionally, many students feel under a lot of pressure to work to make ends meet, and to also do as much as possible to gain experiences. The PhD is not only about doing your research and writing. It is also going to conferences, networking, doing research assistant work, attending workshops, etc. We are all very well aware of the competitiveness of the market and often feel huge amounts of pressure to gain as much experience as possible. All of this can lead to a burn out, when the body and mind have just had too much.

Low self-esteem

One thing that you don’t get so much in other forms of employment is constant criticism. The PhD is like an apprenticeship where you learn how to be a researcher. And the best way to learn is through someone pointing out everything you are doing wrong. However, many academics/supervisors forget to also point out the stuff you’re doing right. As a result, many PhD students are left with a low-self esteem and feel like a failure. In addition, academia in general can be brutal and academics are used to harsh criticism from the journal peer-review process, and automatically transfer this style onto their PhD supervisees without really thinking about the consequences.

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.

I came to the UK to do a PhD in 2013. At the age of 28, I gave up a career, family and friends back home in Croatia because I became interested in research. But I had no idea how both wonderful and painful this journey would turn out to be.

I had struggled with my mental health since I was a teenager and had been on medication and in therapy for a number of years (I now have a diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder). However, prior to coming to the UK I had been stable and off medication for over two year. Very early on in my PhD I started struggling again with my mental health and went to the GP and the uni counselling service to ask for help, but I wasn’t able to get more specialist and appropriate care. This partly led to me having an episode in December 2015 (I finally got proper help, too bad I had to reach breaking point). At this point I took a six-month leave of absence from my studies.

I was slowly recovering from the episode and getting back into my PhD in 2016 (and was about to get married in two months) when my husband had to undergo chemotherapy for a type of lymphoma which started causing him problems almost overnight. At this point I took another leave of absence to take care of him.

After my husband recovered we both went back to our PhDs and he managed to finish his very soon after. I, on the other hand, had another episode (manic/psychotic) in autumn 2017 which took several months to recover from.

In the meantime, we had settled in York and bought a house and despite all of the problems, life was good. I finally managed to submit my PhD in December 2018 and passed my viva with minor corrections a few months later. I was so happy and thought this was the end.

Then, half way through the corrections I had my third episode (this time a depressive one) and had to ask for a leave of absence and delay the completion of my PhD yet again. I am still coming to terms with this. I know I will finish it eventually but at the moment I can’t help but feel that it’s not fair.

So you can probably guess that my PhD journey was nothing like I could have even imagined, and life threw truly its best crap at me (and my husband) in the last five years. But I’m still glad I came – I met the love of my life, I built a life here and have wonderful family and friends as well as deeper understanding of myself and my abilities (thanks to the PhD).

I managed to finish my PhD (almost!) because I had an understanding supervisor and a supportive husband and friends, but this is not the case for everyone and systemic support from universities is seriously lacking. At present, the PhD degree is structured in such a way that it a) often makes students mentally unwell, and b) does not allow for any deviations from the traditional path (e.g. an ill family member, getting pregnant, being disabled, etc.).  

In the next few posts I will talk about what tips/strategies helped me on my PhD journey but I’ll also aim to discuss some of the systemic problems within universities that contribute to the poor mental health of PhD students world-wide.