I’m back from Venice – it’s cold, it’s dark, my PhD office is heated only by a dodgy old storage heater that the facilities team regularly threaten to confiscate, no-one has sat at the vacant hot-desk on the other side of the room for months and there can be days where I go a full 24 hours without seeing anyone. November has been proving tough. Despite how much Vitamin D I try to to take and exercise I try to get, the seasonal depression is back and I’m struggling with it.

There’s also been a couple of setbacks with my PhD: an unsuccessful funding application, a useful archive that is “closed and inaccessible until further notice”, as well as a bout of writer’s block. It’s hard not to feel like these are problems I have to deal with totally alone, given the fact that as a PhD researcher I’m basically my own line manager and only I really know how the project is going. At my last tutorial, my kind, soft-spoken supervisor gently probed: “You seem very anxious and stressed”.

I’ve struggled with my mental health for a long time. I remember it first getting noticeably bad in 2010 when I started my undergraduate degree. Since then there’s been a few periods where anxiety has been absolutely at the forefront of everything I do, as well as times when it’s almost totally silent. This July I decided to stop taking the SSRIs I’d been prescribed a year prior to that and to try managing things myself.

While I stand by that decision (for me, for now) the pressure, self-direction and, let’s face it, loneliness of doing a PhD create a challenge.  Lately there are days when I don’t feel like getting out of bed – and in this kind of job I don’t actually have to. No-one knows if I’m sitting in my ice cube of an office finishing off a chapter draft or curled up in the foetal position watching true crime documentaries and eating toast. But then the days when I don’t feel I’ve achieved enough, that feeling of under-achievement manifests into thoughts of “I’m not good enough”, “I don’t deserve this opportunity”, “I’m wasting it”. This can lead to working through illness, losing track of a work/life balance and generally “wasting” more time wallowing in the anxiety of it all. It’s hard. And sadly I don’t have a nice neat conclusion to tie things up here – it’ll continue to be hard sometimes, and less hard other times.

I’ll put a couple of links to interesting things I’ve read about PhDs and mental health below:

More than one-third of graduate students report being depressed (2018)

Why studying for a PhD could be bad for your mental health (2017)

Dark thoughts: why mental illness is on the rise in academia (2014)