Minal
Sorry, I was just recording. Hi everybody. My name is Minal, and I’m a research scientist at AstraZeneca. Welcome to this webinar. And thank you for joining and spending time with us on this wonderful Friday afternoon with us. Um, I’m also the chapter board officer of the Association of Women in Science, Bethesda chapter, we are thrilled to have you here and we hope that this webinar will be informative and inspiring for all of you. As we are working through this pandemic, we are grappling with overwhelming anxiety and stress, managing both our professional and personal lives. Today we will talk more specifically about mental health and academia, as this is the community community that is facing mental health challenges at a much greater level than before, and academics are at higher risk of burning out. These challenges impact or eukarya researchers in their ability to perform work and
advance in their careers. More specific, more specific groups in science face additional barriers, including woman in STEM and underrepresented minorities, the Association for
Women in Science, Bethesda Chapter is pleased to host this event, which brings together individuals from different stages, career stages of both within academia and from outside
organizations. Panelists will present unique perspectives and highlight their work on this topic, including how different stakeholders can come together to improve mental health in
academia. The panel, panel is also meant to emphasize the importance of diversity in creating a more academic enterprise. I’m very happy to be moderating this event. First,
let me just go over some quick logistics. with you. We will be, we will have panelists present their work, feel free to ask any questions in the private chat window that I will be monitoring throughout the webinar. Towards the end, we will have a chance to have time for Q&A with our speakers. And we will be also recording this presentation and we will send out a link to for you to access it in the future should you choose to do so if you don’t want yourself to be recorded, please feel free to turn off your video at this point. And with that, let me start by thanking our panelists for being here. And for sharing their perspectives on mental health. Let me introduce your first speaker, Dr. Nathan Vanderford, who is a professor at University of Kentucky. Sorry, one second. He has done extensive work on developing methods to improve mental health in graduate education by mentoring and providing career development opportunities for graduate students. In this presentation today, he will talk about some of the initiatives that he has taken to address this important issue. Nathan, would you like to go ahead and share your presentation from your end?
Nathan Vanderford
Absolutely.
Minal
Thank you.
Nathan Vanderford
All right, can you see my screen? And you can hear me? Good? Well, I’d like to start by thanking the organization for, for one putting this very important panel together. You know, this is an extraordinarily important topic. It’s been an important topic for many years, even though it’s been in the background, and we’ll talk a bit about that. In just a second I’ll mention sort of how I’ve thought it was has been in the background for years and not as elevated of a conversation as it should be. And then now, you know, as stated just a few
seconds ago, it’s, it’s probably even a more important topic, because although we haven’t studied this yet, you know, I am sure in our current situations, you know, working from home, being isolated, more, facing many more stressors, the, the mental health challenges are going to be even more elevated than they were so. So again, thanks. Thanks for putting the, the panel together. And thank you very much for the opportunity to be here and be
part of the panel. So over the next couple minutes, you know, I don’t want to take a whole lot of time. I think it will be very engaging once we get to the discussion and questions. So not going to take a whole lot of time on slides but make a few comments on some of my
understanding of the mental health challenges in academic trainees. So to begin with, so my I’ve had a long term, long-term interest in supporting graduate students and postdocs supporting their career pursuits and their career development, written many articles on this topic, and back in the middle of 2015, Dr. Theresa Evans and I. Teresa’s faculty member at
University of San Antonio Health Science Center, we were collaborating on some other projects. And just sort of, by chance, we were discussing mental health and mental health
issues that we were seeing in some individual trainees and our respective institutions. And then, you know, as researchers that we are, we began looking into this topic a bit more, and found that in the literature, at the time, so back in 2015, there weren’t, there wasn’t very much known about this, not very much had been studied, published, there were a few publications in the peer reviewed literature and a few reports, but but some of those things, well, showing very important data and showing data that suggests elevated mental health issues in academic trainees. Some of those were limited to single institutions or, or individual disciplines. And as I alluded to, a second ago, the conversation was not happening, as it should be, we we recognized, you know, that we were seeing issues, we knew there were issues going on. But the community at large, nationally, internationally, wasn’t talking about mental health, and academic trainees as it should be. So because of
that, we felt like we could potentially be in a position that we could study this issue a bit, and try to elevate the conversation on the topic. And that’s what we sort of set out to do. And I think we were successful in doing that. And I think that, I think, I mean, I don’t know this, for sure, but much of the conversation over the last three years or so I think has really been driven by some of the work that we did. And that was published in a Nature Biotechnology paper, early 2018. And that’s the data I’m gonna provide a little bit of narrative around today. So, see if I can advance the slides. There we go. So again, our study, we set out to do a multi-institutional, multinational study, that could be more diverse than what had been done before. So we design this cross sectional survey that we delivered through social media, extensively on Twitter and LinkedIn. And we also use direct email to several different institutions, targeting individuals and asking them to either take the survey, if they were students, or to forward the survey on if they were administrators. So for study, we specifically in the data that we published in Nature Biotechnology, we analyzed our data that we collected on anxiety and depression. For anxiety we used well, both scales are clinically validated. Anxiety was the GAD seven scale, and depression was the PHQ seven or PHQ nine sorry. And the the data in this paper, the data I’m going to talk about today was all graduate students. It’s about 2279 respondents 90% of those are PhD students, 2% master’s students. Respondents were from 26 different countries, 234 different institutions, and represented a variety of disciplines with biological, physical sciences, engineering, humanities, social sciences, being represented. And then we displayed our data with just simple descriptive statistics and use chi square analysis to determine statistical significance. So in our, in our population, what we saw was quite elevated rates of anxiety and depression. So, so in the population, there was about 41% and 39% of the individuals with moderate to severe, to severe anxiety and depression, respectively. And within those groups, the non male individuals, so females, trans people that were, were considered themselves transgender had the highest elevated rates of anxiety and depression. And and while we didn’t have a control population in this study, what we know is that looking at data of the general population that’s been published by many national and international organizations, mental health organizations, these rates are significantly higher than the rates that are seen in the general population. But they follow along the same general trend in terms of non male populations having the highest rates. What we also saw in our population was that individuals who identified as having unhealthy work life balance, were much more likely to have severe to moderate anxiety and depression, suggesting that those with more healthy work life balance can alleviate or reduce or protect against anxiety and depression. We also ask several questions about mentoring, mentorship, relationships, relationships that graduate students have with their faculty advisors. And what I think is not surprising to most of us is that those who had more positive relationships tended to have lower rates of anxiety and depression. And we asked a variety of different questions that we thought got to the the mentor mentee relationship. And many of these that we asked about this ring true in terms of the more positive the relationship, the lower the rates of anxiety and depression. And then, you know, in terms of the conversation, as I said, this paper really almost immediately, really took off in the media, there were many different organizations that covered the story. Lots and lots of tweets, lots of conversations on Twitter. And then, because of that, and because of flood of comments that Nature received, they put together a feature story in May. So the paper came out in March, Nature received by early May, 150 scientists that contacted them sharing their personal stories that really, you know, went along with the data that we, we presented. And because of this, they published this feature, they they highlighted five people’s stories, and then they put together a cool other article on mental health and they can contr-, continue to contribute to those articles, which I think is fantastic, because I think one of the things we need to continue to do is continue this conversation around mental health and ways in which we can deal with it. So just to conclude my comments here today, I think it’s clear from our data and other data that’s been in the literature before our work and since our work has been published, it’s clear that that academic trainees, and it’s not just graduate students and postdocs as well have elevated rates of anxiety and depression, also of stress, high levels of stress are likely driving some of these higher rates of anxiety and depression. And it’s it’s also clear that these challenges are really entangled with many, many issues. It’s not necessarily one or two particular situations are issues that are driving this, but it’s many, it can be personal situations, the job career outlook, work life balance, mentor relationships, and harassment is a critical issue in this as well. And we can discuss that more, but it’s all types of harassment. And many of these things, so mentor relationships, the harassment, these have no place and in any workplace or in any situation. And these are some of the things that can change and they can help us help us address the mental health challenges among our trainees that that, so deserve much better work environments to do their work and their training than than what they have now. So with that, I’ll stop for now and let
the next speaker go.
Minal
Yeah, thank you. Thank you Nathan, for sharing, that was very insightful. I you remember those feelings of anxiety and hopelessness myself many times, I’m in grad school, and I even was very afraid to ask for help. And I had to get up that courage to go to my ah, the institutional therapist for help, especially towards the end of my PhD. It’s amazing work that you are doing. Thank you for sharing. And thank you for raising awareness on this
important issue on providing base to build confidence and self esteem among the early career scientists Thank you, I apologize, my, I’m at a conference room in my in my workplace. And so for some reason the power went out. So my light went out, suddenly, sorry about that. I don’t know when it’s gonna come back, I was trying to redo it again. But Sorry about that. So our next panelist is Dr. Zoe Ayres, who is an industrial analytical scientist, and has been a mental health advocate for many years, helping to raise awareness about mental health within graduate student communities. She has recently created very informative graphical posters for researchers to use when navigating stress and challenges faced in different stages of their careers, which she will tell you more about. Thank you Zoe.
Zoe Ayres
Thank you very much. I just wanted to start today really, with saying thank you to
the organizers for inviting me to be here today, I think it’s. really important that we engage in these conversations about mental health in academia. Because by having those conversations, we can actually then start to understand the experiences and concerns that people are going through. And it’s only by understanding those concerns and experiences that we can start to move towards action and move towards change. And change is really, really important if we’re serious about diversity and inclusion in the sciences and in academia. So often, academia is a very toxic environment for a lot of people. And it tends to drive people out into other places, and unfortunately, to other things, as well. And, really, we need to address the mental health environment, there’s no amount of resilience that a person can have to survive in some of these environments. So it really is the culture that needs to change. And so that’s something that I’ve been trying to work towards myself, and there are a lot of other people advocating in the space as well. And so just to point out, I think it’s important to do so I’m not a mental health professional. I’m also not a researcher on mental health, I actually an analytical scientist, I’m a chemist by background, I work as a research scientist, but in the water industry, and the mental health advocacy work that I do is really just a passion project of mine. And to give you context of that I experienced mental health concerns during my PhD for the first time. And that really gave me some perspective on just the concerns and the level and, and the pervasiveness of mental health concerns throughout academia. And I think it to a certain extent, it left such a scar on me that even though I’ve left academia, I still want to help people. And so that’s why I do the work that I do today. So first of all, I just really wanted to start by, by showing you this graphic here. And this kind of represents how I how I felt during my graduate school days. So I felt like I was one person amongst a sea of 100 people with mental health concerns, that I was the only one that was experienced anxiety and depression. And as I looked around, I looked at these people, and I thought, Gosh, they’ve really got, you know, they’ve really got it together. And they really know what they’re doing. And there’s me and I don’t deserve to be here. And I’m not good enough. And it was only really when I started talking about my mental health with with some of my friends and some of my peers who were doing their PhDs with me. And that took a long time, it’s not easy to open up, I started to realize actually how pervasive mental health crisis is among graduate students. And really, this graphic looks more like this. So there are many studies out there, and the statistics go from 40% to 50%. So maybe one in two PhD students have mental health concerns, whether it’s anxiety or depression, a lot of that is actually based on environmental factors rather than pre existing mental health conditions that obviously that does also occur and does exist. Having pre-existing mental health conditions can also compound the environmental issues that you’re faced with to make it even more difficult for you to stay in academia. And one of the statistics that I found really shocking was that 35% of PhD students that are struggling, only 35% actually find resources that are useful at their institutions to actually help them through that. So that 65% of students out there that are doing that PhD that are not getting help from their institutions to help them through it. And so that’s obviously something we need to change going forward. And so we’re going to talk a little bit about some of the things that I do so one of the main things that I do is I create mental health posters and infographics about mental health concerns that people often face in academia. And the reason for this is really just so that I can raise awareness about the issues and act as a starting point for a bigger conversation. I always try and make sure that people understand that I’m not coming from a not I’m not a psychologist, I’m coming from lived experience, also talked to a lot of people. I think Twitter’s a great resource, and lots of people that are willing to share stories, we just have to be willing to listen. And about a year ago, I put out my first poster, which is like the one on the bottom left here. On Twitter, I thought, okay, well, maybe I’ll help one or two people. And in 24 hours, half a million people had seen the poster. And I was just shocked and astounded, to be honest with you. I just realized how international and how pervasive this mental health crisis is among graduate students and how we need to help. And so if you want to see more of these posters a bit up front, then you can find them here on my website down here on the bottom left. And these posters are all free to use and distribute, and always will be. So they’re just available there as a resource. So the other thing I really wanted to mention, so I’m not going to go through the posters that I’ve got here. And by point by point, I don’t have time. But what I did want to point out is that I don’t like to just create posters that put the onus on the graduate students themselves. So obviously, there are things that we can do to improve our resilience. So things like understanding what imposter syndrome is, and trying to fight
that. And that’s a battle that a lot of us face. And we’ll always face. Understanding that failure is not necessarily something that that is a bad thing. And also, adapting to situation
understanding and being aware that these are some of the mental health concerns you may face so that you can be better equipped to deal with the scenario that you’re in. But what I really like to point out is that institutions can do things to help help PhD and grad students. Because if I can create a poster about some of these main concerns, then the institutions can also respond to that. So things like the financial concerns, okay, well, university should be reimbursing you quickly, after, after you’ve paid for conferences out of your own pocket, and things like actually training the trainer, so to speak, and making sure that your PI is trained to be a good mentor. And also promoting work-life balance in a workplace so that you can actually have a better work-life balance and find value in yourself in something other than your PhD program. And so, for final couple of minutes, I just want to talk a
little bit about some of the other work that I do. And so I’ve been doing a lot of work around breaking the stigma around mental health, particularly with researchers. And so one of the main big projects that I’m running at the moment is called 100 Voices, which you can find on Twitter using the hashtag on the bottom left. And what I’m doing with, with the help of 100 brilliant and amazing researchers, is I, what we’re doing is we’re creating a banner for people actually displaying their mental health journeys and putting the faces to the names of these 100 amazing researchers. And each one of these people are talking openly about their mental health and showing everyone else that they can be brilliant at what they do with their research and still have mental health concerns and operate just fine. I think it’s really important that we do this to normalize mental health. And finally, launching next week is Voices of academia, which is a blog up and running with Marissa Kate. And we’re starting that on Twitter as well, with the aim to kind of go into a little bit more detail about people’s mental health experiences, provide a voice for academics to share their experiences from undergraduate, all the way through the tenured professor. And really having those conversations encourage cultural change. The other thing that we’re looking to do as well as also to promote wellness, so focus on the strategies that do work and like show what best practices at different institutions so that people can actually use that as a talking point going forward. And so if you’re interested in that, then the the Twitter handle down here on the right is there. And then just to finish, and really, I think the onus is on both individuals and institutions to improve the culture and academia. And I think we need a bottom up and top down approach to do that. And it’s only together by listening to one
another that we can really do that. And we need to move from awareness to action with mental health in academia, to really improve that culture and meet them. So thank you very much.
Minal
Thank you. Thank you, Zoe. That was really great. Thank you for sharing your work.
I really found those posters very helpful myself. And I think they would make really great cheat sheets to put on my desk whenever I feel lost in my career path. It was really it
was really great. Thank you.
Zoe Ayres
Thank you
Minal
for sharing. So our next panelist is Dr. Adriana Bankston, who’s a former bench scientist with a passion for improving the academy enterprise. In this context, she’s an advocate for improving academic mental health as a way of creating a positive and supportive environment for early career scientists. Adriana will have to show your presentation. I think you, oh yeah, you got it,
Adriana Bankston
Can you all see that?
Minal
Yeah.
Adriana Bankston
Okay. So thank you for including me in this lineup, it was really great to hear about institutional initiatives, I’ll be talking about sort of an outside effort through the Dragonfly Mental Health, non-profit, just a brand new non-profit that is seeking to cultivate excellent mental health in academics worldwide, through a consortium for academic mental health that is made up of I think about 70 individuals. And we’ll go through a little bit of the makeup of this. So just to give a little bit of background, in terms of mental illness, in academia, as has already been said, has reached epidemic proportions. With graduate student mental health struggles being pervasive and severe. And specific mental illnesses, such as depression and anxiety are both biologically and environmentally driven, as has been alluded to. And the statistics say that approximately 50% of graduate and professional students suffer from depression or anxiety. And this too often results in suicide. However, stigma and fear of societal and career repercussions are preventing those that need help from seeking it. So this is sort of the background that I’m coming from in terms of advocating for grad students and postdocs who are struggling and what we can do sort of from an outside perspective. So to give you a little bit of history of the non-profit, so it was started by Wendy Ingram, who is a postdoc in the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins. And so she had lost a classmate of suicide while she was, she was a PhD student at Berkeley. And then well, her during her postdoc at Hopkins and other colleagues took their own life. So this is really serious. So it motivated her to start this nonprofit. And I have a quote here from her saying, I can’t bring my friends back, but I’m going to do whatever I can to prevent others from being lost, and others from losing. So it’s really motivating to work with Wendy. And there’s a lot of us that are really lucky to be involved in this group. So some of the things that the group has done, starting with Wendy’s efforts has been connecting students in terms of forming networks, both at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins. So I think that’s really important. Also education, in terms of creating talks to improve mental health literacy and workshops for faculty in terms of active listening skills. So this is a really important point to think about faculty coming out, talking about their stores as well, which can help early career researchers to do the same. And I’ll show you a little bit about that later. And sort of the third element of this is fighting stigma, which she has produced video interviews of faculty and staff describing their own struggles with the idea that this would hopefully change the culture in the sense that when students see their PIs do it, they might be more likely to come out and talk about their issues as well. So it’s really I think it’s really important that faculty come out and discuss these things. So I wanted to show you one video that was recorded from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health if I can, I’m gonna have to go out one second okay. So this is um mental health and academia starting the conversation with faculty and it’s five minute video hopefully will be informative.
Zoe Ayres
You might need to change the window Adriana.
Minal
So, Adriana, what you can do is maybe unshare your screen and share it again. Maybe sometimes that gets stuck, am
Adriana Bankston
sorry.
Minal
Do you want to unshare your screen and share again, because sometimes the video may
be reasonably load on the screen.
Adriana Bankston
Yeah
Minal
yeah. Yep, it comes up.
Adriana Bankston
Can you see it?
Minal
Yeah.
Adriana Bankston
Okay.
Minal
Oh, I think the sound is not coming.
Adriana Bankston
You can’t hear it.
Minal
No.
Adriana Bankston
Okay, that is. Okay. I don’t want to delay this too long. I might just send this out after. So we can keep going.
Minal
Oh, Rachel is saying that if you share the screen, there’s a way you can share the volume as well.
Adriana Bankston
Oh, yeah. Hold on. I think. Okay, let’s try this again.
Video
Here too, everyone disperses across the.
Minal
We can hear that now.
Adriana Bankston
Could you hear that? Okay.
Minal
Yeah. Thank you, Rachel.
Adriana Bankston
Thank you. Okay, so let’s do that.
Video
Adam Kuhn
Oh, when I was in my master’s program in 2004. You know, one of the things people don’t tell you when you study international health is that one, everyone comes from all over the globe. But then when it’s all over in a year or two, everyone disperses across the globe. And I came straight through undergrad. So I didn’t have a lot of life experience to draw on. And when it became clear to me one day I woke up and all my friends were gone. And it became clear to me that I had no idea what to do with myself. I’m Adam Kuhn. I’m assistant scientist in the health systems program in the department of international health.
S. Wilson Beckham
I’m S. Wilson Beckham. I go by Will, my pronouns are he, him and his and I’m an assistant scientist in the Department of Health, Behavior and Society.
John McGready
Hi, i’m John McGready. I am a senior scientist in the Department of Biostatistics.
Sarah Murray
I’m Sarah Murray. I’m an Assistant Professor at the Department of Mental Health within the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
S. Wilson Beckham
Yeah, I have struggled with mental health issues most of my life, I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression about 11 years ago, while I was in grad school.
John McGready
I’ve suffered from anxiety and depression for I don’t know, 20/25 years, I’ve been diagnosed and gone through periods of treatment and non-treatment, etc.
Sarah Murray
But mental health problems are interesting because we, there are things everyone can understand, right? feeling a lot of stress, feeling a lot of anxiety. It’s something that everyone resonates with everyone. And at the school, we’re in a very, very stressful environment. So I think sometimes I kept wanting to say it was the environment. And it wasn’t me. And the bottom line is it was it was both and I didn’t need to expect myself to
overcome it by myself. It wasn’t that I wasn’t dealing with the stress well enough, or that I wasn’t suited to do this kind of work. It’s that I needed support.
Adam Kuhn
I started losing weight, I stopped eating well, I stopped doing a lot of things that made me me. And one of the things I did that helped kind of get me back on the path was to reach out to the counselling services within the university itself.
S. Wilson Beckham
In grad school, I wish I would have known how many more people were struggling. I did talk to a few other students while I was in grad school and struggling and they were like, Oh, yeah, me too. What are you taking? You know, and it was like, oh, yeah, a lot of us are going through this. This is a very high stress environment.
John McGready
No, my classmates work harder. They’re better at this. I don’t have time to deal with this distraction. But in reality distraction was keeping me from doing, you know, my best in school. So I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s, it’s okay, it’s important to make time for these things if you need them.
S. Wilson Beckham
You know, as a student, you kind of don’t want to open up about it in the way that you think maybe someone will be like, Oh, it’s an excuse, or you’re trying to get out of an exam or make an excuse for a bad grade or something like that. So there’s a lot of pressure there. But I think that’s unfortunate and inappropriate. And I think if faculty opened up a little bit more about it, I think it would, I think it would help a lot of students.
John McGready
Perhaps, I mean, it took me a while to, you know, realize that I needed help, or could benefit from help, because I don’t have as bad as that person, or, you know, it’s only temporary, or, how’s this going to help me anyway, you know, so actually, admitting that maybe maybe something could help was a good thing.
S. Wilson Beckham
I would say to students who are encountering mental health struggles to reach out, you know, tap into all the resources that are there. You know, pursue counseling, whether it’s on or off campus. There’s a lot of internet resources these days, too, that you can do. Reach out to other students find at least one trusted faculty, or staff that you can open up to.
John McGready
There’s no shame at all. And certainly, this is the entire field because people have been studying how to help people who have these issues. And so if you need to talk to somebody,
talk to your advisor, if you don’t feel comfortable with that, talked to me, I mean, come find me. I mean.
Sarah Murray
I think I wish I’d also known what a process that would be, and that it would take time, and that sometimes you go to a therapist and stop right therapist, and sometimes you got to medicine, it’s not the right medicine, or sometimes you try one thing, and another thing, and it’s it’s not right or it, circumstances change. And I think knowing that it would be a process and take time, would have been helpful.
Adam Kuhn
You know, the only regret I have is, is in my PhD program towards the latter phase, when I had two kids and I was working and finishing my PhD, I could really saved myself and my wife a lot of tears from seeking some help at that time. But I do see, you know, therapy
and getting health, mental health, protecting your mental health, like you go to a doctor for your physical needs. I see it as a lifelong pursuit and a lifelong kind of self-betterment
strategies, making sure that you’re, you’re helpful by getting help.
Sarah Murray
So it’s been a process over time, and something that’s evolved and changed as the needs of my life have changed. But overall, it’s been an upward trend, which has been a fantastic process to go through.
End of video
Adriana Bankston
Okay, so hopefully that was helpful. I really like this video because it shows the realities of what people are going through. And as I said, having faculty speak out, I think, is really helpful. So I want to just give you a little bit of background about what the organization does. So our mission is to improve mental health and addressed unhealthy culture currently pervading academia. We’re made up of scientists, researchers, students and faculty from all over the world. And it is a inclusive and multidisciplinary organization. Our goals are to accelerate the development, adoption and evaluation of evidence based strategies to produce a sustainable mental health culture in higher education. And this hopefully, will be done through reducing the burden on students and faculty as we aim to be sort of an outside resource and provide institutions with a comprehensive package of initiatives to implement that they wouldn’t have to actually come up with. So hopefully this will help their institutional culture. And I just want to tell you a little bit about what we’ve done so far, and where we’re going. So in the times of COVID, so we’re hosting COVID cafes, which are live zoom calls that take place three times a week. individuals from different parts of the world get together and talk about how they’re coping and give advice. It’s very helpful. And we also have a Dragonfly, Dragonfly cafe, which is a slack space where we can
discuss this issues more openly. And it’s been really, really great as well. In terms of the projects, we have three working groups consulting, research and systemic change. While we’re looking at different aspects of mental health in academia, and we have worked on a couple of workshops on cultivating mental health busting myths of stigma, building knowledge and skills. So this has multiple purposes. The first one is to improve mental health literacy, to break the stigma through storytelling, like I showed you, to train faculty in active listening, and then also discuss with the participants about barriers and solutions for cultivating mental health in academia. And we’re hoping that we will come out of this with some methods that participants can take back to the institutions to implement what we’re designing here. And I think this has been successful in terms of what Wendy has done. We have submitted this to the Society for Neuroscience, which has been accepted and also to the American Society for Cell Biologists, we’re hoping waiting to hear from that. So I think this will be an exciting way to gain more input and see what trainees are saying about these
issues. So it was said in the video, the some advice for individuals who want to advocate for mental health is just talk to people. Determine who the allies are, maybe invite people to help, and also who the resistant parties are, so you know, who can help you and who can’t. And sort of the three points to take away from this connect, educate and fight stigma. And these are obviously different things you can do under each one. And realize that sometimes this can be urgent, and compassion is really important. So here’s another quote from Wendy, saying, “We’re doing this work for everyone in academia, but we’re also doing it for the person next to us in the lab, who’s struggling, our friend, our colleague our competitor, even that individual may not have tomorrow.” So this is realizing that we really never know what people are going through. And we should reach out and be compassionate to the people who work next to us, and try to help them. I’m here I’ve just put a few resources from Nature, Science, that we can click on, I can share the slides afterwards to look at but these are really helpful. And that I just want to end with contact information for the consortium, as well as myself, I’m happy to discuss this more, if people want to. Thank you.
Minal
Thank you Adriana. That was wonderful, incredible work, you’re doing, great efforts to the Dragonfly organization for reaching out to researchers and academics indeed. I feel like many times, you know, academics don’t share their stories out of guilt, and stigma. So providing support and resources to them is very valuable. Thank you so much. So, so you have all given the presentations, and thank you so much for providing all of your insightful thoughts and around mental health, and its impact on academic communities and how it is important to create inclusive culture to help students and faculty thrive in their professional and personal lives. And this is also relevant to Women in STEM, the Association of Women in Science, Bethesda chapter is committed to providing an environment and diversity, oh environment of diversity and inclusivity. So that women can feel safe to share their perspectives. We also provide many resources for career development and mental health for women in STEM, such as these types of workshops, and webinars. I encourage you all to explore more opportunities on our website. And so now that you have time for questions for our panelists, feel free to, to pro-, to leave questions in the chat window, and then I’m going to monitor that. And I can start by asking what first the first question. The first question is why do we think that these mental health issues exists in the first place, both at the national and international level? So maybe Nathan or Zoe you can talk about it, and then Adriana can talk about it.
Nathan Vanderford
Yeah, I think, you know, in my last slide, I mentioned that it’s a multitude of factors, I think, you know, we have our own personal issues, the life part of the work-life balance, you know, and, and none of us are perfect, and we all have things in our life that are stressors personally. But then outside of that, I mean, there’s multiple layers of the professional setting that are very stressful. You know, graduate school in general is stressful, just the stress of the coursework and the research in general. But then, you know, these mento relationships are very complex power dynamics is totally skewed toward the faculty member. And then if you have a poor mentor of any sort, that power dynamics, it becomes an even greater issue. And then there’s harassment issues. So it’s just a multitude of things that all culminate into, you know, an extraordinarily extraordinarily stressful environment that can promote anxiety, depression and other issues.
Zoe Ayres
I think for me, one of the things is the fact that there, the number of faculty positions versus the number of PhD students that go through has changed drastically as well. And so the competitiveness of academia in general has changed. And there’s such a focus on metrics, that ultimately, the only people that can really compete and make it or a lot of the time, not not not a generalization, because because some people do, and they’re great. And a lot of people really have to just be able to survive in that environment and thrive in that competitive environment. And sometimes that’s really, really difficult to do, I think, especially for people that have families as well, where your work life balance can’t, you can’t put in an 80 hour week, because that’s not something you can do. And so there are always people because the competition is so high, there are always people that are willing to be able to do those 80 hours, therefore, you kind of certainly get pushed out, because you’re trying to keep up and you can’t.
Adriana Bankston
I would say from my perspective, the power dynamics, and also what I mentioned in my presentation in terms of repercussions for students speaking out, which can affect their careers. So this is I think it really comes down to how we can create better spaces for those conversations to happen.
Minal
Yeah, sure, sure. We have another question. So what is one significant thing that that you and your organization is one that has working on to address this issue? We’ve already talked about a lot of it in your presentations. But one significant thing that you are currently working on that be useful for for the audience.
Zoe Ayres
I guess I can go first. I mean, so I work in industry at the moment, but I also work with universities. And so I guess from the university perspective, what I’m seeing is a slow change to improve mental health resources for postgraduates. I think so often, mental health resources are geared to undergraduates. So things like surviving exam stress, when you may not even have exams to do and, I mean, that’s perfectly fair, because a large portion of a university campus is undergraduate. But it we’ve got to recognize the people that go on and do postgraduate research are people that then go on to be faculty that then go on to teach those undergraduates? So actually, I think universities are solely recognizing that it’s important to support higher up the chain as well. And I think that is happening a bit the resources and the provision needs to change accordingly. It can’t be the same as you know, a study group and things like that, because it’s not the same thing.
Nathan Vanderford
Yeah, I at the institution, where I’m at University of Kentucky, you know, I’ve actually been pretty pleased with the response. Currently, the University I’m sitting on a committee at the
level of the provost, where we’re looking at mental health for graduate students and postdocs. And we’re looking at a variety of different things, some of which are focused specifically on faculty. And both carrots and sticks. So recognizing really good mentors, but also putting in place things that can really hold bad mentors accountable, including preventing them from having further graduate students in the future until, you know, some bad behavior is rectified in some way or some training is done or whatever. So things like that, I think, can really be beneficial if institutions really make it a top priority at the level of the President, Provost, Chancellor, whatever the organizational structure is.
Minal
Great, thank you for sharing. I will go ahead and get the audience questions that are coming in, um, in the interest of time, so one, let me just pull that up. Second Oh. So Michelle is asking what how can we balance or be comp-. So Michelle is asking the competition in academia helps push important research to the forefront. But it also promotes anxiety and depression. How can we balance the pros of both sides?
Adriana Bankston
So I can start, I think a lot of this comes down to having honest conversations with faculty and setting expectations ahead of time, especially if you have a family, there are things outside that you need to pursue and or if you’re struggling with mental illness, making sure that you can talk to your PI about these things. I think that’s one of the major things is just setting expectations when you first start in terms of saying I will not answer emails, after this hour, I have a kid and so on. And so hopefully, that will be a constructive relationship. Otherwise, you may have to find a different mentor.
Zoe Ayres
I think to a certain extent, as well, we have to start looking for different metrics to judge people on as well like things like the the ability to mentor, I think in the current system, and the way it’s set up, it effectively rewards privilege. If you have the privilege of time, then then you’re going to get more papers, and you’re going to get more grants, and therefore you’re going to be more successful. And it’s really just reevaluating what that success is, and changing that accordingly so that it can be more inclusive.
Minal
Yeah, wonderful. And we can follow up with all of your questions afterwards, if we don’t have time to get all of this in live. So one of the questions that came up in the group in the chat was, what do you think about the fact that academia does very little t support women academics in specific and how a lot of them feel pressure to return to work? So soon after giving birth, for example?
Nathan Vanderford
Well, I just say that I think institutions need to be much more supportive. You know, it’s, it’s ridiculous that they are not. And it’s ridiculous that you know, even environments that may say they’re supportive, when you come down to it, they’re really not. Even institutions that have some policies, there’s still lots of pressure for people to come back sooner than they should, or sooner than they want to. And so, institutions need to be held more accountable to that. And it’s, and sometimes it’s not necessarily just the institution, it’s down to colleges and departments. And so that, you know, structures need to be put in place where things can be, those policies that might be in place can be more easily tapped into, and there’s not any source of guilt placed on on taking advantage of any policies that might be in place.
Zoe Ayres
To that end, as well, I think. So I’m, obviously I think it’s probably quite obvious that I’m not in the US. I’m based in the UK. And the maternity policies, for example, in the United Kingdom are very different to the maternity policies that are in the US, for example. Over here, it’s typical to have nine months to a year off as a maternity policy, a standard and in Germany, for example, I think it’s even better. And I think when when people are coming to do grant applications, there needs to be leveling, levelers put in place, say this person was off for a year from from maternity leave. So of course, she doesn’t have that many papers because she was off for maternity and just kind of leveling that out a little bit as well.
Minal
Yeah, No, that’s great. I think they’re different. The cultural differences between the US and
other places definitely matter and definitely are different. So definitely keep that. Keep that in mind. Another question that came up was, do you think toxic toxic experiences during grad school as students lead academics to carry some of these toxic behaviors into their roles as mentors and PIs, perhaps without awareness? And what can we how can we address that?
Zoe Ayres
I think we have to call them out. If we can I insert it sometimes we can’t. And again, it goes it plays back into what Nathan was saying about power dynamics, we often can’t. But when when we can we need to because that because I suffer you should suffer too is not an appropriate response. If I broke my leg and told someone that they should also break their leg we’d be outraged and we should also be equally outraged by this in regards to mental health.
Nathan Vanderford
Yeah, I agree that this certainly goes on. And and it should be stopped there.
It should not, you know, it shouldn’t be tolerated.
Adriana Bankston
Yeah, I think this also comes back to educating faculty and like mentor the mentor and all of this and what they will be taking with them. So I think, if you’re taking anything from my
presentation is that we need to focus a lot on the faculty and educating them in terms of how to deal with these issues and talk to their trainees.
Nathan Vanderford
This is where I actually kind of liked this policy where you know, if we can pull this off the University of Kentucky, if you had a bad mentor that’s doing some of these things, and even perhaps even more heinous things, you just, you don’t allow them to have graduate students or postdocs, and then how are they going to get their work done? I think, you know, they probably don’t care, because they’re probably horrible people anyways. But, you know, that that kind of thing needs to happen so that other other graduate students, postdocs can be protected from that sort of bad environment.
Zoe Ayres
I’m curious about that, Nathan, like, Is it like an anonymous reporting thing? Or like, do you have to go up to the head of department? Like, how does that work?
Nathan Vanderford
Well, they’re, they’ re, we’re still working on it. But there is discussion about an anonymous, sort of call-in, you know, reporting mechanism. But then obviously, at some point, you know, if the lab is small, it’s going to not be so anonymous, but, you know, protections will be put in place as much as possible to protect trainees from any repercussions when that kind of reporting happens.
Zoe Ayres
Yeah, I guess it’s about building trust, isn’t it and making sure that their students know that the institution is on their side. Not on the side of the PIs.
Nathan Vanderford
Right?
Minal
Yeah. Well, I’ll just ask one last question. Um, for our for all of the panelists, before we call before we wrap up. So if you had a magic wand that would change academic culture around mental mental health, what is the one thing that you would want to bring the significant
significant change that you would want to bring into fruition?
Zoe Ayres
For me, it would be to do away with the concept that work hours in equates to the passion of a person. So like, if I’m working 80 hours a week, then I’m the most passionate and most capable, and therefore that will be rewarded, I think, I would say that, if you get the work done, you get the work done. And if you if you want to have a work life balance that’s no longer frowned upon.
Nathan Vanderford
So I think it’s it’s the culture, you know, we need a radical cultural change in academia. As we’ve discussed already, multiple layers of that, we just need to be decent people to each other. I mean, and that’s, as we see in, you know, culture right now, that’s not just in academia, it’s everywhere. Everybody deserves to be treated with the utmost dignity. And that’s just obviously not happening everywhere. And there’s no reason why it should be, you know, it should be pretty easy to be dignified to each other.
Adriana Bankston
Yeah, I would definitely echo that and say, just making academia more accepting of the fact that scientists are human beings. And we’re not just producing papers. And you know, working on removing the stigma around discussing mental illness about talking about this topic will be just like any other topic, and science.
Minal
Yeah. Great. Thank you so much. Shout out to all the panelists for your time for your insightful thoughts and presentations on an end Institute institutional initiatives and academic efforts for their early career researchers and your external, external work on this very important topic. Thank you very much for for your time today. And thank you everyone who joined us today in this webinar. I hope this was informative. If you like what was presented here today, please feel free to check out more resources available on our website @ www.awis.org Than you so much, and have a great weekend, everyone
Nathan Vanderford
Thank you.
Adriana Bankston
Okay, I’m gonna just close this and hopefully the recording will stay
Minal
yeah, let me try and do that.
