After my Ph.D. I Expected Celebration, not dealing with my Mental Health

One year ago, today, I earned the title “Dr.” after having successfully defended my dissertation. Though that night I celebrated with my friends and family, in the weeks, months, and year after, I profoundly struggled with my mental health.

For the first week or so, post-Ph.D., I tried to keep up the rhythm of writing. I did revisions on my dissertation, asked people about next steps for turning it into a book, and explored some of the gaps in my project. But this made me feel oddly empty. It felt as if examining the next steps of the project was merely a performative obligation that distracted me from the fact that I did not feel well in my body. So after a week of revisions, I uploaded my dissertation to the library system and just…stopped.

For several weeks I could hardly muster the motivation to do the bare minimum. I slept ten or eleven hours, watched movies, walked the dog, and ate. While in the moment I called this “self-care,” something still didn’t feel right. Whenever I thought about the dissertation or someone mentioned the defense, my heart rate would spike, my breathing became shallow, my stomach turned into a knot. When friends who were still in the writing process told me about their work I had to take a moment after the conversation to collect myself, clean the sweat off my brow, take deep breaths so I wouldn’t hyperventilate. I kept having nightmares about writing my dissertation, weeks after I had finished. My blood pressure — that started becoming an issue in the last year of my doctoral work — remained very elevated even though I was done with the degree. Friends and family starting noting that I was not well.

I didn’t understand what was happening to me. I was done. I should have been celebrating. I should have been relishing in this incredible accomplishment.

Instead I was fighting off panic attacks and waking between nightmares.

My therapist invited me to explore the conditions under which I wrote my dissertation. She reminded me that I began my archival research in January of 2020, but by February my wife became incredibly sick.

We didn’t know what was happening but for days my partner was having trouble breathing and was constantly exhausted. At night, she had to lay down on her stomach to muster any semblance of rest because laying down in any other position caused her to feel like she was drowning. She went to the doctor but all the common tests — flu, strep — came back negative. One day I was doing archival research in New Jersey, an hour away from our apartment in New York City, and I received a call that my wife was in the emergency room. Her doctor rushed her there, concerned her lung would collapse. I rushed back to the City and met her. Doctors took a scan of her lung and the scan was “fuzzy.” So they said the tests were inconclusive and she likely just had something viral.

She did…it was COVID. One of the early cases in New York City.

Within two weeks it became clear that COVID had spread across the nation and New York City, our home, became the epicenter of the virus. Schools, government, all shut down and we were told to shelter in place. Once schools went remote, we made the decision to move in with my in-laws. Our building had a profoundly negligent landlord who we had fought ever since we moved in. We would go days without hot water, sometimes without running water all together, among the other myriad of housing violations we experienced. So we left, feeling we couldn’t emotionally handle a shut down, a negligent landlord, and a pandemic. But the saga with this landlord never ended. A few weeks later we returned to the city to empty our apartment and end our lease. But the landlord never returned our security deposit. Over the next two months we began documenting our interactions with the landlord as we attempted to get our deposit back. We consulted with lawyers and in August of 2020 I opened a lawsuit against our former landlord and prepared our case for court.

All this happened while I restructured my entire dissertation in light of the fact that all the archives I was going to consult closed and locating individuals for, much less conducting, oral history interviews became nearly impossible. Indeed, in the very months that we were displaced, my partner was sick, and I opened a lawsuit against our former landlord, I was writing the first chapter of my dissertation.

The next several months were a mixed bag. We moved out of my in-laws house in August of 2020, I started a new job while writing my dissertation, our court date kept getting pushed back due to the pandemic, my partner got COVID a second time in September after schools reopened in person (she’s a teacher for the Department of Education), and I became acutely aware of the fact that my dissertation funding was ending in May of 2021. We only had a year-long lease on our new apartment so in the Spring we began looking for a new place to live, only to have many proverbial doors shut in our face for a variety of reasons.

As this happened, I wrote Chapters 2 through 5 of my dissertation and prepared for my defense.

During this whole time, the dissertation and I developed a strange relationship. I’ve met people who fell in love with their research, and the process of writing a dissertation confirmed their vocation as a scholar. For me the dissertation was somewhere between a distraction and obligation. I would hide away for hours reading and writing, frequently fighting against the intrusive thoughts that none of this mattered. I kept reminding myself this was the last thing I needed to do for a degree I had worked so hard on while simultaneously contemplating the possibility of dropping out of the program entirely. I kept thinking about the people whose stories I was writing while reflecting on the ways my priorities had changed in light of so much instability, wondering if a dissertation — indeed, a Ph.D. — really was the best way to contribute to my community.

The dissertation became less a place of inquiry and intrigue and more a place through which I could ground my trauma and instability.

And it wasn’t always like that. I began the dissertation process with joy and excitement. I loved the archive, feeling like an explorer looking for hidden treasure between microfilms and folders. I relished in the creative work of bringing together multiple disciplines that rarely talk to one another. I felt like a musician accompanying people on a journey through my words and inviting them to relish in the melody but not run away from the cacophony.

But when my world was upended and life for all of us began to be characterized by instability, the dissertation became the consistent touch point between traumas.

When my wife got Covid — I worked on my dissertation.

When the pandemic was declared — I worked on my dissertation.

When we left our home — I worked on my dissertation.

When we sued our former landlord — I worked on my dissertation.

When we moved, again — I worked on my dissertation.

When my wife got Covid, again — I worked on my dissertation.

When we weren’t sure where we would live — I worked on my dissertation.

I didn’t stop working because I had to finish. Funding was running out, I had a new job, I had to be done.

After recollecting the conditions under which I wrote my dissertation, my therapist invited me to begin the process of actually listening to my body. Instead of seeing the high blood pressure, the panic attacks, and the nightmares as a sign of defectiveness, she asked me to greet these moments and ask my body “what are you trying to tell me?” She talked to me about the ways our body can be triggered even before we cognitively and logically are able to name the emotions we’re experiencing. In this claim she was building off the work of Bessel A. van der Kolk who wrote the groundbreaking book The Body Keeps the Score. Though speaking about a variety of traumas, van der Kolk’s central claim is that those who have experienced trauma “chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies.” They feel warning signs of discomfort — sweat, a tight chest, sinking gut — but train themselves to ignore these signs or numb them in an attempt to feel control.

But numbing or ignoring the warning signs in our bodies doesn’t make the trauma go away, instead it intensifies the feelings. As a result, the only way to actually heal is to “become familiar with and befriend the sensations in [our] bodies.” Only by asking what our bodies are trying to tell us can we then begin identifying the central triggers for our anxiety and then do the difficult work of healing.

After months of intense therapy I have been able to talk about this experience with several people. What has shocked me is the fact that many people who have written a dissertation — even those who finished before the pandemic — experienced a similar mental health crisis after finishing. Months of depression, anxiety, panic attacks, all after the arduous process of completing a Ph.D. And even if the conditions of their dissertation writing didn’t include a pandemic, it often included similar themes: housing instability, lack of funding, health crises.

As a scholar and administrator I’ve leaned into the idea that if a phenomena happens to one person, it may be unique, but if it happens to multiple we need to begin asking if it’s systemic. And in the case of doctoral work, I think it might be. Doctoral workers across the country are often writing dissertations while teaching multiple classes in order to supplement their less than living wage stipends (if they receive a stipend at all). As they write, they are often unsure about whether they will find a job after their degree due to an increasingly constricted academic labor market. Those who question these labor conditions and collectively organize to fight for change often experience the brunt of neoliberal institutions who hire extremely expensive legal teams to threaten the livelihoods of workers and maintain the status quo. And throughout all this — in addition to often caring for dependents, children, and/or family members — Ph.D. workers research, write, and present their work nationally and internationally, generating an incalculable amount of revenue for their institutions in the form of marketing and recruitment. Given these conditions, it’s unsurprising that between a third and half of all Ph.D. students seek counseling for depression and anxiety.

This is why I share my story. A year after completing my Ph.D. I continue going to therapy, I have stable housing, a full time job, a loving family, a supportive partner, a beautiful dog, and a healthy blood pressure. I still get the occasional nightmare but by and large I’m not experiencing the sudden panic attacks and sweats that were triggered by talking about a dissertation. I’ve even started revisiting my work and thinking about what kind of book I want to write.

But it was a really long journey to get here, and at times a painful one.

What I have wished for the whole time is that someone would have shared their story, and warned me that this might happen. Not that it would — indeed, not everyone experiences post-Ph.D. depression — but that it might have. Because then I could have started healing sooner. And I could have started asking if something was wrong with the system, as opposed to something being wrong with me.

May we continue healing.