the agile academic

Susanna Harris on Mental Health and Well-Being in Higher Education

May 31, 2021 Rebecca Pope-Ruark Season 2 Episode 1
the agile academic
Susanna Harris on Mental Health and Well-Being in Higher Education
Show Notes Transcript

To kick off the second season of *the agile academic* podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Susanna Harris, science communicator, graduate student mental health advocate, and founder of PhDBalance. In this conversation, Susanna and I dig deep into the mental health and burnout, and talk about trust, support, and removing the stigma of mental health issues in higher ed. 

 

To kick off the second season of *the agile academic* podcast, I’m joined by Dr. Susanna Harris, science communicator, graduate student mental health advocate, and founder of PhDBalance. In this conversation, Susanna and I dig deep into the mental health and burnout, and talk about trust, support, and removing the stigma of mental health issues in higher ed. 

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Hello listeners. Welcome to the agile academic, a podcast for women in and around higher education. This season I talked with my special guests from all over academia, about a wide range of topics from teaching and research, to coaching and mental health, to vitality and burnout, and everything in between. 

I'm your host, Dr. Rebecca Pope-Ruark.

This season is brought to you by my summer Monthly Sprint Weeks. Learn the basics of Scrum project management to organize your work, spend a week focused on a project with the encouragement and support of a group of other faculty, and take time to reflect on your accomplishments and next steps. Learn more at rebeccapoperuark.com/sprintweeks

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Rebecca Pope-Ruark (RPR): Welcome to the podcast, Susanna. It's great to have you here. 

Susanna Harris (SLH): Absolutely, thank you for your patience with me settling into my new job and being able to say yes, because what you talk about is so important. 

RPR: Thanks. So why don't you just tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your background? 

SLH: Absolutely. So I finished up my PhD in microbiology and immunology right around this time last year. So 2020 graduated into a pandemic, and I was lucky enough to pursue some of my interests of overlapping, being excited about social media, being excited about science communication and just general communication across different sectors. So now I work as a manager of engagement and communications for a biotech accelerator, which means that I get to interact with academics and scientists and business people all the time, help them connect without necessarily being right in the middle of academia. 

RPR: I think that's great. As a, as a writing professor in a previous life, we were always trying to help our students understand that, you know, with communication skills or, you know, different types of rhetorical strategies, that they could go into a lot of different industries and knowing something about an industry and being able to add your communication skills to it, um, was so valuable in the market. So that's really great that you get to combine your different skill sets in this new job. So congratulations. 

SLH: Thank you. Yeah, it's a, it's absolutely my dream job and, um, I'm sure we'll get into it of a little bit of my path getting there, but I think a big takeaway for me all through grad school and continuing onwards is that I don't necessarily want to be the expert of any one thing in a room I'd like to be in a room with the experts and help them communicate with each other. Uh, and so my experience in science and outreach and communication, and now hopefully a little bit more business is the piece that allows me to, to do that work. And it's amazing to see how many roles are coming up in that specific position and that so many PhD students or graduate students or academics are really perfectly suited for this kind of job. 

RPR: I think it's an opportunity for folks who work with graduate students to be thinking outside of the typical, I'm assuming that you're going to go get an R1 job somewhere, but be more open to the fact that there are this variety of amazing opportunities out there. If you think about how skillsets fit together. 

SLH: Yeah. And I, you know, I didn't, I didn't know about this job until I was already out of grad school, I think for a lot of reasons, and it's not, it's not something that I blame my graduate program for at all. We had a really supportive graduate program and student center postdoc center for graduate students and, and, um, just to build our careers. So it wasn't a lack of necessarily access. It was just that until you're kind of in the space and learning about what exists, it's hard to know all these different facets and all of these different options. And so in academia, I didn't realize how much I was surrounded by people who had one career path and because of that, they just didn't know really what all exist. And, um, and what that looked like. I think the most surprising to me, I think the most surprising thing to me about making this transition out of academia as while I was in it and asking people what that transition would look like, how it feels, how I would even manage that. 

I got a lot of, well, I don't know, it's kind of a black box. Nobody really knows, well, nobody knows in academia because they haven't done it now that I work with a bunch of PhDs and MDs and people who have been, or even our professors, they know most of my coworkers have made that very specific transition. And so it's been really, really cool to kind of flip over to what academics think is the other side. And to see that it's not really the other side, it's just the next step in a different pathway. Hmm. Yeah. 

RPR: I think it's so important that we even at the undergraduate level, but especially at the graduate level that folks know that there are different paths and there are different ways to use your skills and engage with, with industry, not necessarily just academia. So that sounds like a great fit for you. 

SLH: Yeah, I'm very excited. 

RPR: Awesome. So you are probably best known on social media as, um, graduate student mental health advocate with over 71,000 Twitter followers, which is insane. 

SLH: It's, it's pretty, it's pretty wild. Um, it was definitely not intentional. And I think that had I known how much it would blow up. Had I known that when I would interact with people, one of the first things they would say is, I've seen you on Twitter. I love that you talk about mental illness. So openly, you know, that was work. I started doing about three years ago, four years ago, had you asked me one, I was deeply struggling with my mental illness, but also the, just the concept of that people would even know, even the close people around me would know how difficult some things were for me just to get through a day. Uh, I would've been mortified. So it's, it's been a really cool learning experience, um, has connected with the most amazing people, all the world. Uh, but yeah, it, it all, it all started just because I really struggled and I didn't find out until well after that extremely dark point in my life that so many other people were going through these things and, and not just that they knew it and not just that I could turn to a neighbor and say, “Hey, I'm really struggling. I'm having these really bad thoughts. I'm struggling just to get to work or, or do basic things.” Not only would they say, oh, that's okay. You know, I've heard of this one in three people in academia, at least at any time are struggling with signs and symptoms of mental illness of some sort. Uh, and so it wouldn't be exposing me to sell it. Wouldn't be exposing myself to people who totally had no idea. It would be making a connection with people who could, could individually support me and who I could support in return. 

RPR: What a valuable way of thinking about that. And I have absolutely found the same thing in my work with burnout. It was a very shameful thing for me at first until I realized that so many people were also going through it. And when I found a voice to be able to talk about it, everyone, I said something to either had their own story or knew someone who had their story related to burnout. So we do in academia, avoid vulnerability. We avoid any sign of quote unquote weakness, and that's one of the cultural issues that I think continues to drag us down. Um, so what patterns have you seen working with graduate students connected to mental health? 

SLH: Well, I think the most interesting thing that, that showed up in our stories on PhDBalance. So maybe I'll take a step back here and explain where some of this advocacy came from. So, um, four years ago, like I said, I had, uh, just a pretty horrific year. A bunch of things went wrong. I ended up in a dark depression and, uh, just really didn't know how to get out of it. And I really struggled. I've, I've spoken openly in a lot of spaces about that, but the next year I read this paper in Nature Biotechnology that again, gave that stat that so many academics were struggling. I read that and I kind of felt... Wow. I feel, uh, this kind of sense of affirmation. I feel like, oh, maybe this is, this is an actual thing. This is part of academia. I'm not this weirdo who shouldn't be here. 

Um, I'm one of a bunch of people and also, um, a bit of anger, right? It, it wasn't something, it was something that's kind of casually, or, you know, out of the side of your mouth spoken about of, oh yeah. Grad school is hard. Some people struggle, mental health issues are common, but there's a difference between saying mental health issues are common. And, um, and this might be triggering to some people. And I want to drop this into here now that we are about mental health, mental illness. So it's okay if this is, this is too much. Um, but these following studies and studies across the nation in the U S have found that about 10% of graduate students have had suicidal thoughts and ideations in the past two weeks. So this is not, that's a different statistic. That's a different idea than just people are having a hard time. 

And, and that was so that was so just mind blowing to me. Um, but the other thing was, is that I went to a conference and looked around and I thought there is no way that this conference has those people. There's no way it was a science communication conference. And I was like, there is no way that one out of three people in this room is struggling. It's me, it's the couple of people in the back corner, but this is not a representation. It was that realization that even as a scientist who sees data all the time, considers herself pretty logical. I could not translate a statistic to my surrounding environment because I still had this internalized idea of what mental illness looked like. So I wanted to bring this up. I wish that other people had brought it up for me a year before. 

Uh, and people had been talking about it, but just not necessarily in the spaces where I was one space where I was a lot was on Instagram, a platform where people will share photos and then they can have a caption underneath. And generally it's a happy photo. It's a photo of success. It's basically the images that we show to our colleagues, whether at a conference or a day-to-day that, Hey, things are pretty good. Yeah. Yesterday might've been a little tricky, but everything's great. Now I wanted to contrast those images, those kind of what a successful graduate student looks like with some of these stories of dealing with mental illness. It was originally called pH depression because I was a PhD student with depression. And I was hoping to find maybe a couple of hundred other students who would share their stories. We can support each other. 

And it just absolutely took off. Um, I wasn't on Twitter at the time. Actually it turned into a group project when I realized that we needed to be on Twitter. And I brought someone else on specifically because I didn't want to use Twitter. I was just like, this is a horrible, terrifying place. I don't feel comfortable with someone else can share our stories. Uh, and it, it just, it grew from there, we switched to PhD balanced because so many people wanted to talk about other mental illnesses, other really difficult things in academia. And to your question of, of what we have learned is that people around the world share more similarities with each other than they might necessarily share with some of their lab mates, with some of their group mates with their professors. And maybe they actually do share some of those commonalities, but they don't feel comfortable talking to them. 

So was really fascinating. But we had folks telling their stories in Brazil, in Italy, in Australia, and all of these stories really focused around the same theme of someone was really struggling with how they felt with how they were being treated. And they felt so much guilt around not being perfect in responding to that. They felt like an imposter. They felt like they shouldn't be there, right. This word should came up all the time. But then they did work to find help. They did work to find support and ultimately they were happy or pleased, or just at least okay. With the fact that they got that help and things got a lot better. 

RPR: I saw a statistic the other day that said that 70% of professionals go through some bout or extended bout of imposter syndrome. And that's across cultures. That's not just a us phenomenon. It's a, it's almost, uh, Kristina Hallett talks about it as an evolutionary imperative. Right. And you needed, you needed to be part of the group to survive. So when you feel like you're going to be found out as not part of the group, it causes this kind of psychological stress reaction. 

SLH: Absolutely. And I would, one of the things, one of the misconceptions, I think I hear a lot from academics than something that I even thought about a lot was, well, I have to get through grad school. This is a really difficult time for me in terms of my self-value, my self-worth, how I saw myself compared to others, that idea of imposter syndrome or feeling like I shouldn't be here. If I get found out, people will be really disappointed and just not want me to be there. That doesn't end. I mean, I work in venture capital, which is, is a term that so many people hear and are very, I was very intimidated, you know, it's oh, these people are sharks and they're so confident. They'll just walk into a boardroom. And I mean, I talk to some of the most brilliant people and they're very kind, and they are very insecure. 

There are folks across the board who still deal with mental illness so many. And when you have these open conversations, a lot of times they are willing to divulge more than they might necessarily. I am now seeing academia and graduate school as this really cool opportunity to do the self-growth, where we tell graduate students, this is a space for you to learn, to learn how to think, to learn, how to be a scientist, which means writing and communicating. I think we should add that extra level of how do you take care of the human of the brain doing that work? How can we see? Yes, you need to learn how to think as a researcher, but you also get this really cool opportunity to learn how to navigate your own thoughts and take care that brain that is doing all of this thinking, learn who you are, support yourself while you do have possibly more access to health resources, then you will, as soon as you leave academia. Um, so I just encourage people to take that moment for introspection of maybe this is not something that I'll just get to that next stage and everything will be fine. Maybe I can see this as a way to support my future self and grow wherever I am now 

I'd love to hear more from you about, you know, burnout and mental illness are, are separate but overlap. So often, you know, what do you with your work see in that overlap? Or maybe some misconceptions about some people will say, oh, I'm so burnt out. I don't want to do anything. I hate everything. And I'm like, that might not be just burn out. That might be something bigger or the opposite where all, sometimes I'll tell people I deal with depression. I deal with anxiety. Oh no, no, no. You're just burnt out. Like those are different. I would love to hear your opinions on that. 

RPR: Yeah. I, I tend to think of kind of one of them with a lowercase B and the other with a capital B. Um, so you know, it's, as we record this, it's the end of April and we all know that April is the worst possible month for academics, uh, finishing up the school year and that kind of works. So it's, we all say that we're burned out, right? Especially this year, but this year has been so hard on people. And the majority of academics worked all through last summer. And while that's a privilege to be able to have a summer without teaching possibly or without other responsibilities so that you can focus on writing or, or, or research it's part of that culture that you get that break. And without that, the faculty that I work with are, they're absolutely exhausted. So yes, there's some level of burnout there, but there's also kind of the larger capital BP burnout, which is, is a diagnostic. 

It's not necessarily diagnosis yet, but it is a diagnostic in the world health organization. They've come up with a, um, uh, a large definition of a concrete definition of burnout as a workplace syndrome that results from chronic workplace stress. So keywords there syndrome, we don't consider a burnout itself as a mental illness. It's a, it's a stress response for unmanageable stress caused by the workplace. So we keep it in that, that particular boundary. Um, but because it is, it feels so much like depression and anxiety. It exacerbates those things if you're already prone to them. And that was absolutely my, my situation, 

The overlap so much that it can be hard to separate them in a diagnostic type of way. So I assumed that I was recurring and depression and my anxiety had just ramped up. And if I just got ahead of that, things would go back to normal or if I could just get some kind of medication that would help me focus again, everything would be okay. And that's the attitude that I went into therapy with. I just need someone to give me medication so that I can get better so that I can do all of the a hundred things that I have committed to doing that I have created for myself to do, to build that reputation. And the idea that I couldn't do that anymore was gut wrenching because that was my whole identity. Um, the idea that academics and this goes back to what your, something that you were saying earlier, our brains are our currency. 

They are, we build our living on our brains. And if there's something that doesn't seem quote unquote right about your brain, it's very difficult to wrap your head around that and to not feel like the world is crashing down around you. Right? So when you're thinking about burnout with a capital B, recognizing that it is a stress response and that it is cultural burnout is a cultural problem, not just an individual problem. And a lot of our interventions focus on the person and absolutely people need support. They need to have outlets for that. They need to have conversations that connect to other people, but we can do that until the cows come home. If we don't fix the culture of higher education and you and I have talked about culture as the issue, um, before in the past. So, so what are your thoughts on how the culture of academia causes these stress responses for graduate students? 

SLH: I mean, thinking about culture is so upsetting to so many people, right? And thinking about changing a culture. And I think there's actually a good reason for this, right? If, if, uh, if you go about your day constantly thinking about how could this be different? How does it need to change? It's actually very difficult to get through a day. Um, and, and you can't be fighting all battles at once. And, and more than that, a lot of people who have been successful in a culture, understandably don't want to hear that they were successful in a culture that was skewed towards making them successful or that this is, uh, uh, grueling and just unfair in so many ways, culture in academia, we know it's racist, it's sexist, it's ageist. It's so problematic, but some percentage of people, even if they're facing some of these barriers will end up being what we call successful. 

And so it's, nobody wants to feel like chance was on their side. Nobody wants to feel like, Hey, maybe they've contributed a lot of times when I've talked to professors, actually, who might not really like the idea of, of mental illness being a huge problem. Part of it turns out to be because if they think about it, they realize that they failed in the past. Um, one of my favorite articles that I have ever written, um, which this, this trend is actually very common for me, was written out of anger and out of just indignance, where I was, it was for a society journal who reached out to me and someone reached out and said, Hey, we'd love for you to do maybe three or five articles about student mental health, mental illness, how to change the culture, how to affect these things. Um, and this person did me, this huge service. 

It's absolutely a service. This is not something I'm saying tongue in cheek, where I propose maybe a three set series. They brought it back to the other editors. The other editors gave their very transparent feedback about their thoughts on having people talk so openly about mental illness and the struggles in graduate school. And I don't believe that they thought those comments would get back to me. And so, rather than writing the articles that I had proposed, I wrote an article specifically aimed towards mentors that addressed their comments without making it really clear that I had seen their comments, but some of these comments were the one that I was just angry for like a month. The good thing is I wrote this article, took a couple of weeks off and then edited, which was necessary, but it was this comment of, well, if we're going to have an article from somebody who is dealing with mental illness in grad school, we also need to have an article from somebody who still likes science. 

I lost it because I love science. I, science is the coolest thing ever. I've loved science, my entire life that is not negated by my mental illness. And I think this dichotomy between a successful grad student, a successful academic and dealing with mental illness, this is a really big cultural issue. And I got a lot of pushback from people who had been mentors because they were saying, oh, it's not my fault. They just aren't interested. Like, there's nothing I could see. And so this article is called, um, dear adviser. It's not just a bad day saying it's, we can feel really bad when we look back in the past and see how we have contributed to a problematic society to see how we have failed people around us, because we didn't know better. I think that's a huge barrier though, to us growing and I wish more academics and it, and it is getting better. 

I think one thing about this is that maybe 10% of academics that I have met really fight back against the changing of the tides. So thinking about how can we make this place equitable? How can we make this place safe and supportive for everyone? And then maybe 20 to 30% are really vocal about let's fix this. And then everyone else in the middle is a little bit quieter, but of all those people in the middle, it's just assumed that they are in that 10% who don't want change. So, uh, it's, I, I often say the best people I've ever met are academics work in academia. I think it's a beautiful, necessary place. Some of the worst people I have ever met are academics and live in that space. So I think changing this culture, there's a bit of an age effect. Um, there are these, these, and we know that there, the, this is a generational effect in some ways that doesn't mean that all people above the age of 70 are bed and all people under the age of 30 are good at not at all. 

But as we see the turning over, we do see this effect of younger people, younger generations being more open to reconsidering the culture and from a space of, I want academia to be better. So many people misconstrue my, um, critiques of academia and of the power systems at play and of what we consider normal. People will see that as oh, she hates academia. Well, she should just leave. Actually. I love it. If I hated it, I wouldn't spend my time on it. I have so many things that I care about if I thought it was a lost cause if I hated it, why would I spend any time trying to make it better now is because I really care about my friends who were academics, who are academics. I think it can be a fantastic place. It can be a culture that we are proud of, but it's not right now. And so how can we, if we love it, how can we make it better? 

RPR: I think in some ways there is maybe I don't want to say pervasive anymore, but in some instances, folks were not taught how to mentor. Like they weren't taught how to teach. So you get into this space of, do you want to you as was done unto me, not recognizing that that might not have been a healthy, productive way to work with graduate students. That graduate students are apprentices and are working with them to move forward in their careers and in the way that they think about into science. So having some sort of training could be one way to impact the culture training for mentors training as teachers. That's something that I work in a center for teaching and learning, and that's something that folks in my profession are always talking about. 

So I came out of a program where I was teaching my own classes in my masters at the master's level. So that was just very common in my discipline of writing studies, but there are folks coming into these R one institutions and other institutions that may have never had an experience in teaching. They may have had a TA where maybe they were thoughtful for grading, but not necessarily working with students in any way. So having that kind of training, having some sort of way of encouraging those conversations and actually have people engage in those conversations, I think is one thing that we can do to start improving the culture. 

RPR: Absolutely. And, and I, you know, my PhD was microbiology, so I did a lot of bench work and I hate the term hard science. I think it's ridiculous. So we're gonna use bench science, uh, because social sciences are science. They are hypothesis driven. Uh, so, so many bench scientists, uh, we'll see it in so many professors who were bench scientists who advise people when they are taught or even exposed to the idea that there are better pedagogical process practices, um, for training people there they're like, whoa, how do we? And so often I'll hear people like, how could we possibly figure out how to mentor better? Like that's so esoteric. There are people who spend their entire careers doing this the same way is that I don't want somebody who has spent their entire career stuttered, just like, I don't want to get my information about physical health from somebody who has spent their career teaching and learning about psychology. 

I don't want to learn about psychology or sociology from somebody who spent their time learning about bacteria, right? Those are different things. We are so used to collaborating. We are so used to this understanding that, uh, science and knowledge changes on a monthly basis. Uh, but, but it is that, well, I did great. Look at me. Otherwise you have to look back and say, Hmm, maybe I could have been better. Maybe that could have been better. Maybe the people I looked up to weren't really doing it the right way, dropping that guilt and dropping that kind of, wow. I, I, wasn't always the best that I could be, I think is a big step. And we can think about it in terms of sports medicine, right? Or, or sports training where every single year we see athletes at the Olympics get faster, get better. Is it because the humans are somehow evolving to be better that fast? 

Like, no, no, no, no. From evolutionary biology, we know that that's not what we're seeing here. What we're seeing is trainers understanding more and more about human physiology and being able to maximize the capacity of people. And so if you train somebody for gymnastics, the same way they did in the sixties, that person is never no matter their nascent talent going to get to the Olympics because we have learned so much more about training in that time. So why can't we apply that to people? Why don't we look at how we're training academics from the standpoint that we look at, what kind of experiments we're doing work high, never did experiments the way we did it in the sixties. I wasn't going to manually do a preliminary chain reaction because that's how they did it. And that's how my advisor's advisor did it. I'm going to use the best technology. 

I'm going to borrow the knowledge of the people who have spent decades optimizing these things so that I can do more. So I can be the best scientist possible. What if we approached mentorship the same way? What if we saw this as an investment of time and of energy academics at all levels are so like their bandwidth is, is blown out. There is not bandwidth left. So a lot of times when I've suggested exactly what you're talking about, maybe people should spend some more time training on how to be a mentor, how to support students. It is an expenditure of time, but what if instead of just a straight expenditure, we saw that as an investment, we saw that as yes, you have to put in time now, but how much more functional could your lab, could your group be? How many more people could you retain? 

We know that when people are struggling with mental illness, with burnout, with things like this, they are substantially less productive. And I don't want to make it sound like the reason we should care about people is productivity, but that's often how you can get the point across to people who might not otherwise be totally sold in is like people who are dealing with depression have way higher numbers of days, where they are ineffective, where they need to take off time. So maybe you as an advisor could spend a couple of your days and that would support a bunch of other people and having more productive days. And ultimately isn't that kind of the point. Um, and I think that another big piece of this is that too often, I'll hear people say, well, I I've heard people say this and I've, you know what I've thought about it myself. 

When I was building my team of, do I really want, I always feel horrible about this, but trying to practice what I preach. One of the things I thought early on was do I want to build a team of people who all outright have mental illnesses that might not be the case anymore, but very early on, it was pre everyone who joined the PG bounce team was open about the fact that they dealt with chronic mental illness. And I still had that ingrained like, whew, do I really want to depend on this? And, um, there is a difference between people struggling and people dealing and managing, um, all are valid, all need to be supported. And the truth is is that if 30% of academics are dealing with signs and symptoms and you decide that I'm not going to depend on anyone with any sort of mental laws, you, you are like anyone who has bragged to me about, well, I've never had a student with mental illness. Well, I've, I'm like, you are not bragging by the way. You're just telling me that nobody trusts you enough to tell you how they are doing or that people have told you and you have refused to listen. That is not bragging. Everyone who is listening to this right now has worked with and dependent on somebody who is dealing with mental illness. And if you don't realize that it's because they haven't told you or you haven't listened. Yeah. 

RPR: I think that's such a powerful point to make, especially about the issues of trust. And when we talk about mental illness, who do we trust? Where do we feel safe having those conversations, if you are, if you're a graduate student or if you are a junior professor, those conversations may be unsafe to have, because you are still depending on those above you to grant your degree or to grant your promotion and tenure, right? We're all looking for those. What if I am found out moments? What if I can't handle? And these are all in quotes, can't handle a quote unquote, what if I'm weak, quote, unquote, I can't let people know that. Who do I trust in this case? And I think one thing that we've been moving toward in higher ed at least is thinking about the mental health of our students, our undergraduates, we're seeing more mental health centers on campus. I know that that's happening on my campus. Those supports are in place for students who are feeling burnout. Cause students will absolutely feel burnout. Students deal with depression. Anxiety is that probably all-time highs. Um, now that it's more diagnosable than it may have been in, uh, in the past. So we're S we're looking at structures that could be extended, that could offer more support to faculty, to graduate students, but there's an issue of safety. How do we get over that issue of safety and self-disclosure in a space that doesn't welcome it. 

SLH: Yeah. I get a question, a lot of, how do I talk to my advisor who is not going to be supportive and my answers don't, uh, everyone needs to tell somebody at some point, but nobody should tell everybody all the time. People assume that I, I, I mean, I, this would be a very strange version of my life, but one of the first things I bring up in any context is, Hey, I deal with depression. It's, you know, hi, my name is Susanna Harris. pronouns She/her, I deal with depression. That's not how it works. And I actually really didn't ever talk with my direct colleagues much about this. I brought it up a few times and it was really fascinating how many people would come to me afterwards and say, Hey, that was really impactful. Thank you for talking about it. I, I brought it up in a student seminar at the very end because I happened to be the first person of the year talking about it. 

So we had a room full of brand new students, and I dedicate my last two sides to being like, Hey, 30% of you at least are going to deal with things it's totally normal. It's also something you can get support for and be a better, happier, maybe more productive version of yourself. Um, people were so uncomfortable and, um, obviously I'm kind of a, I have a lot of opinions, uh, and I felt a little bit weird about it. And then I had multiple professors. I mean, the head of my department come to me and say, Hey, thank you for doing that. We need that. I needed that. Uh, and so as far as trust goes, you know, tell people when you can tell people when you think it might help them, um, you know, try not to use people as your therapist, but, but see them as a confidence, see them as a friend speak when you think it's appropriate, check in with them too. 

I think there's a huge need to check in with people and say, do you have the bandwidth to talk about this? Or, or are you kind of maxed out because ultimately you want to be sharing with people who you can help or who can help you and who can support you. You don't, like we were saying at the start, you don't need to be fighting battles with everybody all the time. And you are going to identify people. They might be advisors, they might be colleagues. They might be friends, family members who you just don't need to have this conversation with. And that is completely fine. That is completely valid. Uh, it can change by the day, but I would encourage you to nudge outside of your box, say, take baby steps. I don't not everybody should jump up on a stage and tell people about the times where they were seriously considering suicide. 

Um, and it wasn't something that I jumped into immediately. It was little pieces bit by bits. And I got to that point and, and it turned out to be a, a really a piece of my life that I don't regret. And I, I feel like has been really impactful and I feel good about, um, but as far as trust, you, don't give people the benefit of the doubt, but also let people show you who they are. And if you're like, this person is not going to support me, they might not support you. So don't, don't expect them to, and it's okay. Find the people and find the, the cheerleaders in your life, the ones who are going to support you and slowly build up trust, give them trust, learn how to trust yourself also that you can deal with people not supporting you. It's, it's such a challenge, but trust is just so important and learning who to trust, how to trust. Um, and, and again, to trust yourself that you will fail and it will be okay. 

RPR: I felt I experienced some of the same things when I started speaking out about my burnout and sharing that as of being very honest about what that looks like, and that's not something that I ever expected to be willing to talk about in any situation, because it was so against the identity that I had built as an academic and what I thought people needed to see of me. So many people didn't notice that I was going through what I was going through because I was an excellent, I could hide it very, very well. I knew how to hide it. I knew from years of hiding depression and anxiety, how to get around it, but it also got to the point where I was so avoidant of everything that it became noticeable, and I had to deal with it. But once I started talking about it, it's that level of connection. 

It's finding that connection that really helped pull me out of it. And when I realized that having those conversations in public, doing the workshops, talking about it by invitation or on my social media could be, it was impacting others because they now had that outlet that they were not, there's nothing wrong with you. There is, this is contextual. Those of us who are prone to mental illness, we're going to be prone to burnout more. So I often say that we have to normalize the culture of talking about burnout without normalizing the culture that causes it. We need to be impacting the culture as well as taking care of ourselves and each other. 

SLH: That's amazing. I am. I'm going to steal that cause that is, that is exactly it. Um, normalizing that burnout happens, but let's not normalize that we are forcing people to become burnt out. That's a different thing. And, and similarly to that point of, you know, we don't, we don't look at people who need glasses and are like, Ooh, well, what if their glasses break? What if, what if they just decide not to wear their glasses? And now I can't depend on where like, yeah, they've got glasses of 50% of people or more of the adult world population end up with some sort of support to improve their vision. And it's just, you know, Hey, can this benefit you? Well, okay, get glasses. If you have the resources, get glasses, get contacts, get LASIK, whatever you need. We would never look at someone and be like, wouldn't it be better if you just squinted? 

Well, I, why would we do that? We would say, be your best self. See the best you can leverage the existing science and options. Why don't we do that with mental illness of, yeah, it's going to be a problem and it can be a problem if I don't take my meds for a few days, uh, if I don't get enough sleep, if I don't feed myself, if I don't care for myself, that's not going to be a good version. That's not going to be the version of me that I like that is supportive to other people. Absolutely. However, if somebody has the right glasses, they can have 2020 vision. If somebody who deals with chronic mental illness has the support they need. They can be more stable than somebody who has never dealt with that. And I think we've actually seen that in the pandemic and I've spoken to a psychologist and a psychiatrist about this of, you know, I'm kind of used to feeling that existential dread I'm, I'm used to waking up and being like, well, I'm useless and everything is bad. 

It's like, yeah. Okay, sure. Let's, let's keep going with the day. That's fine. That's a thought, but let's move on. Um, and so I saw a lot of friends who had never dealt with, with any sort of mental health concern get totally wiped out from this really early on because they didn't have those coping strategies. They didn't have that support network that, that I needed to have to be functional in regular life. Uh, and so I would say we can see this as, um, as a practice in becoming resilient. And what I have seen is that people who have looked at their mental health, who have looked at the struggles that they might have, that others might have are better prepared for these kinds of stressors that can come about. Um, then obviously then they would have been without this preparation, but also oftentimes then others who have never had to deal with these feelings, thoughts, intrusive ideations, um, that they can be more stable. 

RPR: Absolutely. I'm wondering if you see any differences with the folks that you talked to, are there any kind of gender differences that yes. I'm assuming, but are there any kinds of gender biases or issues that seem to be prone more to women specifically than male folks that you work with? 

SLH: Yeah. I mean, it's, it's fascinating. Right? And I think that it's hard to distinguish between, is this a biology? Is this a societal? Is this how they were raised? It's everything right? Like, so when I say I see that men are less likely to talk about it, which we know across the board from every single study is like, men don't want to talk about it. That's and what we know about that, it's not just like, well, men are bad at communicating because that's how they're born. No society tells them that they need to be a certain type of person. So when I say men do this or struggle with this, it's not men always have to do that. That's always have to struggle with it. It's it's not putting the blame on the individual man of, well, you're not even strong enough to talk about your department. 

You're facing so many things. And, um, on the flip side to people who are non-gender conforming, meaning that they don't ascribe to the gender binary of man versus woman, um, or that they are trans and have changed, um, their identity, identity, gender, or, or have realized their, uh, identity and gender maybe a little bit later in life. They also don't feel comfortable talking about this. They deal with, uh, incidents of mental illness at higher levels, partially because they don't necessarily have role models. They don't have people to look up to. They don't have the support and they're with this extra level of fear and oppression. Um, and so they're not talking about it. That doesn't mean that they're not dealing with it. It doesn't mean that they're not strong enough, but it means that they are carrying extra weight. Uh, and we see differences across cultures, across races, across socioeconomic status status. 

Uh, and what we see is that there's actually higher levels of people struggling, but lower levels of people who are able to talk about it. And I say able and not willing because the reality is until that point of trust and reserving your energy, if you're fighting battles on all sides, you don't really need to add another one. However, not talking about things, not getting support, carrying around that guilt can exacerbate feelings of, of inadequacy, of fear of stigma. Uh, so I think it's really important, but if you go onto the PhD Balance page and look at these stories, one of our issues, and you know, you and I have talked about this, one of our issues is that it's a bunch of white women generally that's because that's usually the population who one has the bandwidth to talk about it. I'm, I don't face a ton of extra issues, you know, there's sexism, but I'm not being attacked on their sexism. 

And then I'm part of the LGBTQ, uh, community, but I'm Bi/pansexual of all the things that our patriarchal society accepts in the LGBTQ community. It is bisexual women because it is, uh, you know, you're, you're heterosexual plus that's basically what it comes out to. And I have a male partner, um, and he, uh, you know, so I have that ability to pass. I'm not dealing with a ton of other structural inequalities and inequities. Uh, so I do have the bandwidth to talk about it. And just because we see white women talking about it, it's usually the people who have the bandwidth, who aren't dealing with a bunch of other pieces and who are at the point where they can talk about it in society, accepts it. Society is at the point where they accept women talking about depression and anxiety. I don't want to make it sound like it's easy. 

It's never easy. I'm not saying that, but I am saying it's harder if you are dealing with other battles at the same time, or even if you are a caretaker or if you are, you know, a professor or a mentor that is expected to be strong. Um, you know, it's a, it's a part of, re-imagining what strength means accepting that society does not allow people to get the help that they need because of the stigma. Um, and also I think I would urge people to, within their communities find this trust. Um, you know, we do see that people of color are more comfortable and probably rightly so with having a mental health care provider who is not white. I think that completely makes sense. And it's also, it's something that we need to accept and promote and say, how do we reduce the barrier of, uh, for entry, for these different to become mental health care providers, because we have a need that's not being filled. 

So all of all of these things to your point is that we don't see as many people, as many men talking about it. We don't see as many women of color talking about it, or non-binary, non-gender conforming people, not because they're not dealing with it, not even necessarily because they don't want to, because they are facing this extra level of fear of stigma, of carrying the mantle of everyone else around them. Um, and so I think that representation is so important if you can support others, you know, try to do so. Uh, and also to, to respect the fact that people communicate differently. And just because somebody hasn't told you that they're struggling doesn't mean that they aren't 

RPR: That is also so powerful. So thank you for sharing that. Um, I want to go ahead and start wrapping us up. So if there was one takeaway from our wonderfully wide ranging conversation that we've had today, what's maybe one thing that you hope women in and around higher ed specifically take away from this conversation. 

SLH: I think we all need to have support and have empowerment. And I think a big takeaway for that is one it's normal. It's something that we need. It's something that, you know, if you look up the Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we need people to support us. We need to feel belonging. We need to feel a sense of that. We can become the version of ourselves that we want to be, and the others will hold us in esteem. So accepting that I think as women, a lot of the time we are riding this balance of being what society wants us to be with the current, at least Western society wants from us of being kind, being gentle, being, um, in a lot of cases, timid and quiet, uh, and also balancing the fact that we want to be strong, that we want to be a leader, and that we want to be able to have the vulnerability to be somewhere in between. 

I would say build up a support system around. You have people who can both provide an outside and an inside perspective. It's really helpful for me to have folks in my life who are not white women who can look at what I'm dealing with and either say, you know, that's a really interesting perspective. I hadn't thought about it. I appreciate that you knew, but also can, can help me see into other parts and help me reflect on how I am contributing to societal inequalities and how I can be a better supporter of other people. So it's important to have that, but it's also so important to have people who build you up, who understand what you're going through. And every single day that I have a call with women who are just building each other up, it's just like, it's so powerful. I work with so many amazing women. 

And so surround yourself with people who you trust, surround yourself with people who build you up, who re-energize you, who you feel like you can lean on, and you feel like you can support them as well. And carry that power, that energy out into the rest of the world, learn to trust yourself with that, learn to trust that they can help pick you back up, that you will be okay with it and make changes. Make adjustments, change the world in the little bits and pieces. And hopefully the efforts that you put in now will not just make you a stronger person, but will also create that cultural shift that we've been talking about to make this a better space for the people who come after you, 

RPR: Such powerful advice. Excellent advice. Thanks so much for being with me today, Suzanne, it's been great talking to you as always. 

SLH: Thank you so much, Rebecca. Um, I just love what you're doing here and just like with a lot of other things, I wish that this had existed a while back because it would have been so helpful to me. And I just, I love that you're putting in the time and effort to do this for others. 

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Thanks for listening to this episode of the agile academic podcast for women in higher ed. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did. To make sure you don't miss an episode, follow the show on Apple, Google, or Spotify podcasting apps and bookmark the show. You'll find each episode, transcript, and show notes at https://theagileacademic.buzzsprout.com. Take care and stay well.

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