Month: November 2020

”I’m having difficulties communicating effectively with my advisor. As grad students, our advisors have a tremendous amount of power over our futures. My advisor has made some *ambiguous* comments about my work recently that make me concerned they won’t write strong letters of recommendation for me in the future. I’m not sure if it’s just my advisor being socially awkward or if this is something I should worry about. I find it difficult to ‘read’ what my advisor is thinking. Not knowing whether I have their approval is a constant source of stress. Expectations are unclear to say the least. I’m trying to avoid ‘outsourcing’ my sense of self-worth and to instead derive personal validation from my own internal sense of accomplishment. But the power dynamic makes this difficult.”

 ”I suffered from OCD for a while before getting psychiatric help. Amazing results from cognitive behavioral therapy. Two books that helped greatly: (1) Can Christianity Cure Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder? A Psychiatrist Explores the Role of Faith in Treatment, by Dr. Ian Osborn. (I was encouraged to learn that Martin Luther, among other major Christian figures, had OCD and found faith therapeutic). And (2) Brain Lock by Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz. I thank God for my healing. I am grateful to psychiatry and modern medicine, but above all I am grateful to Jesus my ultimate healer. ‘He bore our sicknesses and carried our pains’ (Isaiah 53:4). If you are being suffocated by obsessive thoughts, get help!”

“My spouse and I have been discussing our plans to have children. While I am excited and even overjoyed at the idea of growing our family in the near future, I am also terrified. I know that parents are experiencing additional difficulties during the pandemic without access to child care. I am already overwhelmed by grad school and can’t imagine how I could make progress on my dissertation with a child at home. Even if I did reliably have access to child care, it is extremely expensive.  Without knowing how long the pandemic will last and where I might be headed after graduate school, it’s impossible to plan for the future. I’m also anxious thinking about what the world might look like for my future children. But I’m also worried that there will always be reasons to put off having kids, and I don’t want to wait too long.”

”I’ve developed insomnia since the start of the pandemic. I used to be able to fall asleep almost immediately, but now I lay awake in bed for hours. It’s so frustrating. There’s not even anything in particular I am stressing about late at night. I just can’t seem to quiet my mind enough to sleep. I usually get up after a while to get some additional work done so that I can at least use the time productively. But then I am groggy the next morning and find it difficult to get going. This only compounds the problem, because then I start to rely on late-night hours to get work done, and the cycle continues. When I do eventually get to sleep, I keep having vivid, stressful dreams and waking up in a panic. For example, I had a dream recently that my parents’ cat was sick, but everyone in my family kept telling me she was fine and there was nothing to worry about. I tried calling the vet myself since no one else was doing so, but no one answered the phone. The dream devolved into an infinite loop of calling the vet over and over again without reaching anyone who could help. I think this dream and others I’m having speak to a sense of powerlessness in the face of so much global chaos. I haven’t found a good solution yet.  I’ve been trying to reduce my caffeine intake and to drink a glass of warm milk at night before going to bed. But even then, my insomnia persists.”

”Wow, what a dumpster fire of a year. As if finishing a Ph.D. weren’t hard enough?! Even before the pandemic, I struggled a lot with depression and anxiety. My experience with both feel intensely physical: I feel immense pressure in my chest, like a giant claw is squeezing my heart, or my hands go numb, like they aren’t part of my body, or I feel a deep, gasping emptiness in my gut. Sometimes, I feel all three at the same time.

The anxiety part really made getting help a struggle for me. Even though I KNEW that mental illness isn’t a personal failing, even though I KNEW my friends and colleagues would be immensely supportive, even though I KNEW therapy and medication works because it’s worked FOR ME in the past, I really struggled with shame and embarrassment that I was dealing with this again. And that shame transmuted into paralyzing social anxiety. At one point, I was afraid to even write down my own thoughts in my personal journal because what if in some distant future, my journal is subpoenaed and people discover all my embarrassing feelings, and then it goes viral as some Buzzfeed article about the ‘13 most embarrassing revelations in former Princeton graduate student’s journal’ and then it gets published on the front page of the New York Times, and then I get fired in public disgrace, and then all my friends and family leave me, and then I get sued for misrepresentation and lose my house, and then I’m a failure for the rest of my life? I mean, putting it down like that sounds crazy absurd, but my thinking was sufficiently disordered that I was seriously worried about this actually happening.

So what happened? Well eventually I summed up the courage to call a therapist and schedule an appointment. I got a referral for a psychiatrist and went back on antidepressants. I’ve been seeing both my therapist and psychiatrist for about a year, and it’s made a profound difference in my life. I’ve also started running recently to burn off anxiety energy. It’s not perfect, and things have definitely been exacerbated by the pandemic/forest fires/protests/murder hornets/etc, but I’m doing so much better. This time a year ago, I was ready to leave grad school to hide in a cave somewhere. This time a year ago, I was afraid to say anything. This time a year ago, I was desperate. It gets better. It’s not easy, but it gets better.”

”I think society strongly overvalues academic intelligence. You can see this in the insane culture of parents trying to get their kids into the best pre-school and obsessing over their children’s IQs. It’s unhealthy and frankly absurd. At least in my experience, I have significant doubts that my ability to succeed academically has really improved my life in any measurable way. I’m stressed out most of the time, depressed, and filled with continuous existential dread. My feelings of anxiety and depression have only increased in response to the pandemic. Graduate school is stressful on good days, toxic on bad days. Despite all the blood, sweat and tears that have gone into gaining a Ph.D., I am faced with grim academic job prospects, and I’m not sure anymore if an academic career is even the path I want. I’m living in my tiny apartment working all hours of the night in my lab and spending half of my paycheck on rent. I’ve honestly lost interest in my research. I fear my fancy academic career is not really impacting the world in a positive way, whereas other careers that might have required less training and sacrifice would have allowed me to have a more substantial positive impact in the world and perhaps would be more fulfilling.”