Adam Levy 00:02
Hello, I’m Adam Levy, and this is Mind matters: academia’s mental health crisis, a podcast from Nature Careers. In this episode: rethinking academia.
This is the eighth and final episode of this special series looking at the unique tolls of academia on mental health, whether that comes from the risk of burnout, the burden of researching environmental destruction, or a lack of accommodation and protection for researchers from disadvantaged groups.
And so, to end this series, we wanted to reflect on whether this can ultimately change, whether we can begin to reimagine an academic landscape that actively protects and supports researchers.
Kicking us off, here are two voices we’ve heard from in earlier episodes.
First Kelly Korreck, an astrophysicist working at It’s About Stardust.
And then Desiree Dickerson, clinical psychologist and consultant in academic mental health.
Kelly Korreck 01:06
A general solution is to not go it alone. A lot of times, researchers are pushed to be that kind of lone wolf.
You’re this island that’s supposed to function, you know, autonomously, and be the answer to everyone. And that’s not how humans function.
We function as groups.
Desiree Dickerson 01:23
In an ideal world, you would have access to psychological support, access to psychological services, that is definitely necessary.
And I think we need to shift our onboarding practices, right? That they should access support structures.
And I don’t mean a really dry, boring course about, here’s the phone numbers you should call them.
Here’s insurance. You should do this, tra la la, right?
Nobody’s going to pay attention to that.
I mean, a space where we can really get very clear about the types of challenges we’re likely to experience, in terms of, you know, the workloads we experience, you know, sort of first person accounts of, of, ”Hey, I struggle with this space, and this is where I reached out, this is how I got help. This is how it helped me.”
It can be asynchronous. You can use online tools. There’s 1000 different ways we can play with this. In-person, work upskilling. These individuals in mental literacy, emotional literacy, right?
What is it I’m feeling right now, if my default setting says I’m just feeling really angry or really upset, but actually what I’m feeling is envy or jealousy or loneliness.
Those are different spaces with different tools that we might lean on to help us feel better.
And if we only value papers and funding, then of course, we protect those who have great papers and bring in lots of funding.
And we don’t look after the well-being of the people who actually need to be looked after.
Adam Levy 02:44
Already we see that there are so many fundamental ways academia can shift, from improvements in mental health literacy to shifting the relationships and structures between researchers.
And in today’s episode, we’re speaking with two academics explicitly about how academia could become an environment that supports well-being, rather than challenges our mental health.
The first is Ciro De Vincenzo. Ciro is a social and clinical psychologist based at the University of Padova, where one of his areas of research is migration patterns in the European Union.
He’s drawn important lessons about academia from his academic research itself.
We started out by discussing the early stages of his research journey.
Ciro De Vincenzo 03:30
I started my PhD at the University of Padua in 2018.
Of course, at the beginning I was really enthusiastic and ambitious.
But soon after I had begun my PhD I started to see all the unique challenges I had to face.
Doing most of the work by myself, reading research papers, writing research papers, doing my ethnographic work in such fields.
And so I started to struggle really a lot.
Adam Levy 04:02
And when you say you were struggling a lot, what were the kinds of impacts you were dealing with?
Ciro De Vincenzo 04:08
I would say that mostly it was isolation. Self doubt, like the imposter syndrome. I didn’t feel I belonged to the academia for what I was doing.
I didn’t feel my work was so high as other works I used to read. And a lot of frustration. Because you have many deadlines, you do many things, but you have the feeling that you are you’re not reaching your milestones and aims, so you’re not kind of producing.
Adam Levy 04:34
Now having made this series and spoken to quite a few academics, and also based on my own experiences during my PhD, what you’re sharing are quite, almost universal experiences.
But did you have a sense at the time that what you were going through was quite shared by many people at this point in their academic careers?
Ciro De Vincenzo 04:55
Oh well, that’s difficult to say and to assess. Because at that time, I knew that most of my colleagues were going through at least same feelings, but we weren’t used to speak about that.
Each of us tended to have, you know, his or her personal time to do research, and so we didn’t have the time to speak about that and to share those feelings, and perhaps you know dealing together with those feelings.
Adam Levy 05:27
Well, let’s talk about how things progressed as you continued your PhD. Because I understand that at some point you got out of the institution itself, and you ended up doing fieldwork.
Ciro De Vincenzo 05:37
So I started doing some hot spots in Europe where migrants arrive.
And they started to engage in real world issues that helped me reconnect my, let’s say, student background, with relevant work.
I felt that I was doing something important by meeting a person, by talking with them, by sharing things with them and also witnessing how people acted in a solid way in border zones helped me in understanding how they could be an inspiration for myself and restore a sense of agency.
Adam Levy 06:16
Could you explain a little bit more? That inspiration that you took from the work people were doing in these migration hotspots. What was that about how people were working together that inspired you?
Ciro De Vincenzo 06:30
Well, I would say that basically their desire to transform their environments.
I think that that was, you know, a really huge inspiration for me.
Because on an everyday basis, through their collective efforts, they tried to transform the immigration environment from several levels, the institutional and political one, but also the community one.
And so that helped me to understand how a community, through shared goals, could really and actively transform the environment in which somebody is doing their work.
Adam Levy 07:06
Now later, after you returned from your field work, what were your experiences back at the University of Padua?
Ciro De Vincenzo 07:14
Well, I would say that I felt that I was doing something with a meaning. Before doing my field work, I was, you know, doing basic research stuff, reading and writing papers, but meeting people, knowing their stories, witnessing their environment, gave me a renewed sense, I would say, of the meaning of my project.
So my self esteem raised up again, because I was saying to myself, ”Okay, you are doing something important. You are doing something for a broader community. You are doing something that is helpful for people crossing borders. And also for people helping them in their everyday issue.”
Adam Levy 07:53
And you were later actually elected to to your University Senate.
What did this teach you about how academic institutions are approaching this issue of mental health and well-being of researchers?
Ciro De Vincenzo 08:07
Due to that position, that institutional position, I began to speak with many PhD students and also postdoc students as well.
Starting to speak with them, to meet them, gave me the sense that what I was feeling before was not private at all.
It was not just me that wasn’t good enough for the academic setting, but it was an institutional tendency to treat mental health as, you know, a private matter, and recognize that that struggle were rooted in a systemic structure was really important for fostering, again, a sense of resilience and empowerment for me and also for my colleagues.
Adam Levy 08:47
But then how do you begin to take that forward, those experiences?
So the lessons you learned about academia, as well as those lessons you learned about community and solidarity?
Ciro De Vincenzo 08:58
Well, I would say that later on in my postdoc assignments, I give a new sense of personal relationships in the workplace.
For me, it’s now important to know really well the people I’m working with, to take time with them, to chat about many things, but also to understand with them.
If we are, you know, exposed to some stressful situation, to engage with those situations together, to try to to change those things together without suffering them alone, I would say.
Also regarding, you know, deadlines before I usually was trying to manage those tight timeline, alone, by myself with a perfectionist, you know, culture.
Now, I’m more accustomed to tell people that I am having experiencing difficulty in respecting some deadlines and asking if there’s the chance to take some more time. And I think that there is really helpful. And healthy style.
Adam Levy 10:01
So those are the steps you’re taking yourself as an individual academic.
But do you have any thoughts, perhaps any dreams, of how academia itself could could reassess and take on this more community approach in terms of how it approaches mental health and well-being of researchers?
Ciro De Vincenzo 10:22
The whole, let’s say, academic environment at a community level, needs to clearly state, for example, the workload and time management of the staff.
Having a precise limit of working hour can help young academics, especially, to navigate, to orient themselves in the time management.
Also having structured timelines defined and shared by the whole team is really helpful, so that nobody is left behind with his or her task.
Also having diversified career counseling opportunities. Because when I was a PhD, I found that was really difficult for some colleagues to transition to non academic environment or careers without experiencing stigma of leaving the academia.
Having those career counselling would be really helpful to help researchers transition into other working environments,
Adam Levy 11:20
And for academics themselves, whether they’re PhD students or faculty or anything in between, what would you want to see them doing to try and foster that sense of, that sense of community and working together, that you saw in your field research?
Ciro De Vincenzo 11:37
I think that there are some points that we can make, as you know, academia to help the whole environment, the whole community, to pay attention to those issues.
Firstly, to transition completely to a collaborative rather than a competitive environment where people doing research are equally treated, without gender, race, cultural under-representation, but also trying to create inclusion and safe spaces during the working hours.
You know, having an environment that welcomes the expression, not only of high performances, but also that is sensitive to individual difficulties, could really help the whole environment to grow as a system.
Adam Levy 12:24
That was Ciro De Vincenzo. And how to grow academia as a system is a core question that our next interviewee has spent a great deal of time asking.
Tammy Steeves is a conservation genomicist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, but she’s also worked to reimagine academia through the Kindness in Science initiative.
Tammy Steeves 12:46
So my other job that I have is, I think a lot about the research system in terms of how it it’s a little bit perverse in terms of how it works, and how we celebrate things like competition and individualism and hyperproductivity.
And how that is not great for the people in the system themselves. And it’s actually not great for society, which is who we’re all being meant to serve.
I think when we think about the research system, well,
Adam Levy 13:15
Well, let’s get into it. Could you explain a little bit more why academia is, as you put, a perverse why it might be set up in a way which actually works counter to our well-being?
Tammy Steeves 13:27
So sometimes what we hear is that the system is broken and we need to fix it.
But what I often say is the system was built this way. It’s not broken at all. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do. And what it was designed to do was to celebrate individual success.
And generally then, that feeds into this idea that it’s individuals competing with one another that will result in the best science somehow.
And then how we measure that best science is how many papers we publish, how much money we bring in.
And it does a lot of damage within the system in itself when we have that individualistic perspective.
But what we also argue within the team that I’m privileged to work with is that we actually don’t get the best science outcomes when we work in that way.
We have a lot of evidence and a lot of literature that points at: if we really want to challenge the most complex problems of our time, we can’t be looking at things within a single discipline.
We need to be looking at things in an interdisciplinary way, ultimately to enable transformative, transdisciplinary research.
And that’s completely counter-intuitive, this idea of individuals getting it right, empire builders going all the way to the top.
You cannot do transdisciplinary work and affect complex change working as individuals.
Adam Levy 14:48
So then it would seem that this is counter productive to the actual outputs of research.
But can you explain a bit more how it could be counterproductive to researchers themselves? How it could negatively impact researchers themselves?
Tammy Steeves 15:03
Yeah, I think there’s so much maddening and infuriating evidence of how researchers within this system are penalized when they attempt to speak up against things like hypercompetition and productivity.
And we know this disproportionately impacts those who are underrepresented or underserved in the community, which is pretty much everybody except a certain type of individual.
A paper that came out recently that was looking at surveys of graduate students and how this impacted their mental health. So these are graduate students that either have anxiety or depression, and the survey was capturing what were those triggers that were feeding into your anxiety or feeding into your depression?
And a couple of the biggest triggers were receiving really negative feedback and also being expected to perform in an unrealistic way.
Then you can see how that kind of feeds into the system and has an individual who may already be predisposed to anxiety, depression, experiencing that even more within that system, or being expected to work on weekends and to do more than they’re supposed to do.
Or do that one more experiment.
Fundamentally, that’s not good for anybody except maybe the person at the top. I would say.
Adam Levy 16:30
Now, can you explain a little bit why challenging these structures would actually be beneficial to academia itself as well?
Tammy Steeves 16:38
If we want the best outcomes, we need that more than one kind of thinker. We need more than one kind of experience. We need more than one kind of way of looking at the world, and one kind of knowledge to really again tackle these really complex challenges.
And so fundamentally, what we want to do to enable the breadth and depth of contribution that individuals have to make is we have to create these spaces and places where they can see themselves and can see their knowledges and their contributions as being valued.
And it’s a big ask to have people to come to terms with that, particularly if they’ve never been challenged or view addressing things like equity as a zero sum game, and that somehow this takes away from their privilege. There’s lots of layers there, for sure.
Adam Levy 17:28
Now, lots of institutions are tackling these kinds of issues, or talking about tackling these kinds of issues. Looking at these kinds of interventions, are they having the effects we would hope, are they addressing the root of the problem?
Tammy Steeves 17:44
It’s a very big question, and I might answer by way of example, because I think the answer generally is is no.
Part of the reason why that’s happening is that we’re viewing each of these things in isolation.
There’s interventions that are, that are suggested. And one of the interventions is peer-to-peer support.
So on an individual level, what we’re asking people to do is to say, Go find a friend, work your way through it.
And fundamentally, if all we do is is look to the individual to fix the systemic problem, it will never, ever change.
One of the things that I used to say was thinking about your sphere of influence and identifying those levers that were available to you. So I’m a professor. I have different levers than a postgraduate student’s going to have, for example.
And I generally thought that was the way to affect change. But I have the immense privilege of being part of something called the Centre of Research Excellence here in Aotearoa, New Zealand.
And this particular centre of research excellence is a centre for complex systems.
And I was giving a presentation at one of our annual meetings and talking about pulling these levers for change.
I was chatting with one of my colleagues who works in public health and has been working in complex systems for decades, and she very gently said to me, ”Well Tammy, what happens is, when everyone is independently pulling those levers, it results in the most perverse outcomes, because we’re not thinking about this as a systematic problem.”
So ever since that moment, a few years ago, like this is a complex systems problem, and we need to be thinking about using complex systems thinking to drive our solutions. Well, we’re under pressure to perform, to get more publications.
We’re under pressure to get more publications, to get more funding.
So there’s this wider systems problem that is enabling poor behaviors like really harsh feedback or really unrealistic expectations.
And some of the least effective levers are those ones that target individuals and that are that are one-offs.
Adam Levy 20:00
So then, how do we begin to pull the levers which shift the systems and actually shift the way academia itself is done, rather than just what individuals are doing?
Tammy Steeves 20:10
What we’re attempting to do is to shift mental modes. Ways of thinking and being that are driving us to do what we do.
And that change is really, really hard. When we think about those explicit changes we can think about making, they’re the ones that we often do. It’s changing policies and practice and resources.
But those ones are actually the least impactful in the long term. Ultimately, what we want to be getting to do is what we might call our relational change, where we’re thinking about power dynamics, where does the money sit? What is the reward structure?
Thinking about relationships and networks in terms of, how is it that this interaction within the system, how does that work, and how does that affect change, and where does that power sit within those relationships?
And ultimately, what we want to do is get to a place where we better understand why we’re doing what we’re doing. This all sounds super esoteric, but what you don’t want to do is to tick box it right and say, okay, so I want to make the research system a better place.
So what policies do I need to change? What practices do I need to change? We don’t want it to be reductive, because when we even think about a complex system, if we break it down into its individual parts and focus on the parts, we’re actually completely missing the point, because what we really want to be thinking about is actually the relationships between those parts, because that’s where the most effective interventions will be.
And so we broke them down into five or six. We’ve got how we act, how we lead, how we resource, how we evaluate others, and how we evaluate ourselves.
So if I bring that back to the example of the paper where students who were susceptible to anxiety and depression. What we can do about that within the system.
One of the other recommendations or interventions that was proposed was related to how we fund. Because it talked about for those students who are in precarious situations that do not have enough support to do the degree, an intervention is to support them better.
But then if we pull that back, well how we fund them is how we fund research, and how we run research is tied to how we value research.
And we also have to be really mindful of our expectations for change. There are no silver bullets. There’s no one way to do this.
Adam Levy 22:39
Now a lot of this can seem very well complex, I suppose, and maybe also a bit abstract.
Can you think of any institutions, or perhaps even industries, which do live up to this kind of model, and what are the impacts on individual well-being and mental health in those kinds of environments?
Tammy Steeves 23:02
One would be this centre of research excellence that I’m privileged to be a part of.
So it’s the Maori name is pūnaha matatini, which is effectively complex systems.
And within our particular centre of research excellence, we are a self-described values-based group of individuals, and where we lead by our shared values and all decisions around how we fund teams, how we host events, how we support others, how we nurture others, all starts with our values.
So for example, if we go through an expression of interest round, where we’re looking for different research ideas to come from our principal investigators. part of that application process requires the people who are making those expressions of interest to actually discuss how this research will be responsive to our values.
What we may also do through our most recent expression of interest was the idea was to get that additional idea, and then to put the support around those individuals, to grow that idea, to say, Okay, this is who’s who’s in this EOI, who’s missing, whose knowledges aren’t here?
So what we often talk about is, but if we start with our shared values and go, ”Okay, we value this duty of care, how are we going to be responsive to that in this particular situation.”
Which might be lack of funding, it might be a conflict between a community and researchers. It might be a conflict between a mentor and a mentee. We can think about what it is that matters there, because we start with those shared values,
Adam Levy 24:45
And now within your centre of excellence, do you notice the impacts of those kinds of changes or specific ways of doing research?
Do you notice the impacts on the individual’s mental health and well-being?
Tammy Steeves 24:59
Absolutely. We see many people come to us who don’t feel like they belong in a system, but they feel like they belong at our centre of research excellence.
They feel like they’re supported. They feel like our way of thinking, our vulnerability in our interdisciplinary spaces, is rewarded and celebrated and encouraged.
And what that means is we get people talking to one another who would never talk to one another, who are working together on projects that from the outside, people often go, ”How did that happen? Like, how did you guys find each other?”
But I would think the testament of the fact that we have people coming to us time and time again, including our early career researchers want to be here and stay.
Adam Levy 25:43
Now, for some researchers listening, this might seem very, very far away from from their own institutions, their own departments.
How do you think maybe more traditional, conventional institutions could begin to transition to something like you described, which really looks at the systems and how the systems are affecting research and researchers?
Tammy Steeves 26:08
It’s a really good question. Think it has to start with a will.
So for example, even when I think about my my own school, we collectively decided that we wanted to be values-led.
And that has also helped in a few difficult situations where something might come up and we’re like, ”Well, this actually isn’t consistent with our values.”
But if you’re in a situation, I would think where the values aren’t there, or they’re not clear, or a system or an institution that hasn’t come to terms with its privilege and hasn’t come to terms with the idea that we’re here to serve the public good, not ourselves as individuals, it’s really, really challenging.
Generally what I think what we want to do is look for the evidence. Because generally speaking, if we can point to the evidence and the evidence can be shared, then it can start to sway thinking.
But I think if we haven’t got it in our leadership, it’s incredibly hard. We still need some impetus to want to see that.
But what it can be is can be, well, actually, the world has shifted, and it’s getting harder and harder to fund sole discipline projects, because the complex challenges that we’re facing require this interdisciplinary response.
So then we can take a strategic opportunity to go, ”Well actually institution you want me to bring in this massive grant in order to achieve that, I’ve got to broaden outside of my current silo, and what I’ve learned by looking at the literature, by talking to my colleagues, or by some of my own lived experience, behaving in this way will actually enable that interdisciplinary relationship, and it will sustain if we behave in this way, if we fund it in this way, if we support it in this way”
Fundamentally, if the money dries up because we no longer want to fund a sole discipline project that’s run by a single research team for the next 30 years, or we want to fund less of that and more of the collaborative work, then we will shift that dial.
Because in order for those teams to work, I would argue they’ve got to embrace those values in order to be actually to work collectively together, otherwise they just fall apart.
We should be okay with complex systems and complex challenges, and to think that a simple change here, a simple change there is going to fix it is completely inconsistent with reality.
So I guess what I think a lot about is just leaning into our superpowers and leaning into the approaches and the methods that we use within our own skill sets to broaden them out into this, into this complex system with which, within which we find ourselves.
Adam Levy 29:00
Tammy Steeves there. And that was the last of our interviews for this mental health miniseries. A series that has seen so many academics share their insights and their experiences.
Unknown source quote 29:12
I realized that there were people out there who have also lived it and can understand me in a way that neurotypical people can’t.
Unknown source quote 29:19
Little bit more of awareness and education can go a long way in improving our life, the life of people around us. But also equally important, our own happiness and productivity.
Unknown source quote 29:32
That has been a little bit like therapeutic to see people engage and to want to do a change.
Adam Levy 29:37
But while it’s the end of this miniseries, do stay subscribed to Working Scientist, wherever you get your podcasts.
Our next series is all about Changemakers, celebrating the scientists who have made a real difference in their workplace, tackling racism and championing inclusion. That kicks off in April.
This has been Mind matters: academia’s mental health crisis, a podcast from Nature Careers.
Thanks for listening. I’m Adam Levy.
