Stop Perpetuating a Culture That Normalizes Mental Health Distress
Challenging situations build resilience by pushing us to our limits, but they can also shatter us
The five years I spent studying, researching, writing, and presenting to earn a doctoral degree were the five most trying years of my life.
As a graduate student, I was expected to prioritize my studies over my wellbeing, so I sacrificed sleep for experiments and meals for rigid time points. In turn, I developed severe anxiety, perfectionism, and an eating disorder because of the debilitating stress and pressure to perform in such a way.
During my recovery process, my eyes were opened to the fact that in academia, especially for young graduate students like myself, emotional, physical, and mental suffering were incredibly common. Just one month before I sought professional help, a study published in Nature Biotechnology found that graduate students worldwide experienced depression and anxiety at rates six times higher than the general public.
Now recovered, I aim to use my story to speak out against these troublesome statistics.
About a week ago, a friend and fellow mental health advocate tweeted a sentiment that truly resonated with me:
A PhD should not “break you”, it should build you up. If you are being broken, there’s something seriously wrong happening.
I promptly liked and retweeted the message. I’ve seen too many bright, happy individuals, including myself, let themselves be broken by the academic system because the sacrificial mentality has been normalized as part of the graduate school experience.
Upon reading the comments, I noticed many others shared similar sentiments. There were some dissenting opinions that I brushed off, but when one of those opposing statements came from someone I knew — someone who closely watched me battle with my mental illness in graduate school — I was taken aback.
This person expressed the idea that graduate school “should” not break someone, but it was most definitely intended to be a difficult experience riddled with psychological tests and adversity.
I immediately thought about how this mentality perpetuates the idea that mentally, physically and emotionally taxing situations are right and just. It’s this mentality that causes graduate students like me to push aside their distress and categorize it as “normal.” And it’s this stigmatized mentality that causes individuals to forgo seeking treatment because they don’t feel like their symptoms are “bad enough.”
But I also recognized the nuance of the matter.
My therapist has taught me a great deal about building resilience — emotional toughness — by getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. Just like we might put strain on our muscles by lifting weights to gain physical strength, we need to put ourselves in tough situations to get mentally stronger.
With that nuance in mind, where do we draw the line between enduring difficult experiences for the sake of growing and struggling through them at the expense of our wellbeing?
Strenuous journeys build grit
On one hand, difficult situations are critical to shaping our character by helping us gain the emotional strength and mental resilience necessary to accomplish our goals.
According to psychologist Angela Duckworth, grit — the combination of passion and perseverance to achieve a long-term goal — is the key to the success of high achievers.
In her 2016 book, Duckworth discusses her extensive research on military cadets, National Spelling Bee finalists, entrepreneurs and Ivy League students. Each of these groups of people willingly engaged in mentally, emotionally and physically strenuous experiences to fulfill their dreams and goals. Through the combined power of passion and perseverance, these people embraced adversity and allowed their challenging situations to build their resilience and grit. In turn, they were better prepared to tackle each successive obstacle.
Through my emotionally and mentally trying graduate school journey, I had also strengthened my own grit.
I learned to embrace failure as a necessary part of life. I performed thousands of failed experiments and collected six lab notebooks’ worth of data that didn’t support my hypotheses. Despite feeling embarrassed and disheartened in the moment, each negative result taught me how to problem solve and helped me cherish the smaller “wins.” Now, I see failure — big and small — as an opportunity to learn and grow towards achieving those needle-in-the-haystack victories.
I also learned how to challenge the status quo, either by questioning scientific dogmas through my novel research approaches or by challenging my mentors on their opinions. Prior to graduate school, I used to simply agree with authority for fear of creating conflict or losing respect. But after spending the first third of my graduate school in agreement, even when I knew I was correct, I learned that I could gain much more respect by gracefully questioning norms and speaking up for what I believed in. Today, I am better equipped to navigate the emotional discomfort associated with disagreement, granting me the ability to speak my mind and advocate for the subjects I’m most passionate about.
Many comments on the tweet reinforced this personal reflection. Current and former graduate students said that by allowing graduate school to stretch, bend and break them, they learned a great deal about resilience, success, failure and balance.
For those reasons, adversity should not be shied away from, but instead embraced as an opportunity to learn and grow.
Exceeding one’s limits can instigate mental illness
In contrast, excessive difficulty is incredibly harmful and can be the spark that ignites new or smolders lingering mental health distress. By normalizing emotional, physical and mental exhaustion as a necessary part of engaging and succeeding in difficult situations, people begin to believe that it’s perfectly normal to suffer.
In graduate school, there’s a culture of overwork — overwork to the point of neglecting one’s basic needs and developing severe stress and anxiety.
Upon entering graduate school, I heard from many fourth, fifth, and sixth students that I should be prepared to “not have a life.” If I wanted to be successful, I would likely be spending 10 or more hours in lab each day, including on weekends and holidays. This culture of overwork was perpetuated from the top-down, as many faculty mentors worked more than 70 hours each week and expected nothing less, if not more, from their students.
Because many graduate students are inherently high-achieving and dedicated to their work, this mentality is greatly exaggerated. To these students, being overworked isn’t possible because such relentless dedication is intrinsic to their hard wiring. Those who work the most hours and have the least amount of free time are celebrated and deemed the hardest working, most productive, and most likely to succeed by their peers and mentors.
Due to this pervasive mentality, I felt that I needed to prioritize my experiments and studies over my personal health. When I started to develop symptoms of my mental illness, I ignored them. I thought my lack of sleep, irritability, and lack of joy were just signs that I was well on my way to be the grumpy lab robot that academia expected of graduate students like me.
When I sought advice from senior graduate students about their experiences with doctoral qualifying exams, the oral and written examinations that determine whether one will have to leave the program, I heard so many horror stories. Students anecdotally recalled cramming an unrealistic amount of information in their heads, only to be verbally annihilated by their faculty committees on exam day.
But no matter the personal costs for their less-than-stellar exam outcomes, every student always ended their story with, “But that’s just how it goes. Your committee members are trying to break you down, so it’s not a big deal.”
My experience with my qualifying exam was just as I had been told to expect. I spent nearly a month obsessing over the scientific literature and class notes to impress my exam committee.
Though expected, no amount of preparation and restless nights could shelter me from leaving my successful exam in tears. I felt I had failed my mentors and would be deemed far from exceptional. From that day forward, the floodgates on my underlying mental health distress were opened.
When suffering becomes a normal part of an experience or opportunity, people fail to recognize that their diminishing wellbeing is a sign of something greater — often until it’s too late. It also prevents people from seeking the treatment they might need for their mental or physical distress.
Because I brushed away the early signs of my mental illness, I failed to seek treatment for half a year after developing an eating disorder to cope with my mental health distress.
I know my story isn’t unique.
Many students from all over the world with whom I’ve spoken through my work at PhD Balance, a community for graduate students to share lived experiences, have expressed the same dilemma. We’ve been taught that it’s perfectly okay for an experience to break us, so seeking treatment should only be reserved for “extreme” cases, not us.
This is unacceptable.
Navigate challenging experiences with care
In January 2020, I served on a panel at the University of Arizona’s Launching Your Career Symposium where I spoke about my mental health journey during graduate school. I aimed to normalize discussions around mental illness and raise awareness about how the expectations placed on graduate school were unhealthy.
The title of the panel was “It’s Okay to Not Be Okay.”
I strongly believed that to denounce the stigma surrounding mental illness, those of us who had battled them needed to share lived experiences of not being “okay.” Enduring and talking about one’s own mental health distress did not make them weak, unsuccessful or any less professional.
It was more than okay to not be okay.
But now able to reflect on the benefits and consequences associated with challenging situations, I have a new manta.
It’s not okay to not be okay when it compromises one’s health.
We must stop normalizing the sacrifice of our wellbeing — especially our mental health — for the sake of growing from tremendous adversity. However, we cannot avoid moderately difficult situations like graduate school because they do have the potential to help us grow and become more resilient.
With that nuance in mind, how can we navigate tough experiences and reap the benefits without conceding our wellbeing?
We must stop perpetuating a culture that normalizes mental health distress. Suffering is not something to brag about, and it should not be something one should just expect and accept when embarking on a new journey.
We must provide resources, like trainings on common mental health distress signs and symptoms, to prepare us with the tools to identify when someone needs help, as well as provide regular check-ins with our friends, family and colleagues.
We must create an environment that is supportive — not shaming — of one recognizing they need professional support by sharing our own battles with mental illnesses and discussing the benefits of treatment.
Lastly, we must denounce the idea that the programs, jobs, schooling, and other experiences we willingly sign up for are designed to break us, and we must certainly reject the idea that such treatment is acceptable.
It’s not okay to not be okay.
