I am a graduate student at Queen’s University, and I suffer from anxiety, particularly due to work-related stress. I want to share my story because, every time I do so, it makes it more likely that somebody else will seek help earlier, or that a colleague, friend or relative will respond constructively when somebody they know plucks up the courage to say for the first time that they are struggling. I’m particularly motivated because of how few men are typically involved in these discussions around mental health: doing so means talking about feelings, and society has done such a thorough job conditioning us all to believe that this decreases our masculinity.
I first asked for help with my mental health when I was 18 completing my second term as an undergraduate student and as the first member of my family to study full-time at a university. Sadly, that request was met with a suggestion that I would be wasting the time of the university’s mental health team. I didn’t ask again until I was very ill, five years later, and I ended up quitting my first attempt at a PhD because my psychological symptoms were so severe. It is hard for me to remember now the details of how I coped back then but thankfully, my family and friends have been supportive all along, with each attempt to talk about these issues being rewarded.
The first of two bits of advice I’d offer my younger self (and therefore anyone reading this) is that if you are struggling with a task, it may well be because you have not been given adequate support for it. More than two decades later, I am attempting a PhD for the second time. I half-joked with my current supervisor in our initial meeting that, with hindsight, I think of that first attempt being the wrong person trying the wrong topic in the wrong setting with the wrong supervisor.
The second bit is to ask for help sooner rather than later, and this could be academic or professional. The times in my life that I have become ill with anxiety have been when I lacked the experience, training, or support to cope with a work situation. It was only after I finally wrote down my worst symptom, walked into my GP’s office, and read out that piece of paper, explicitly asking for help for my mental illness, that I started acknowledging properly that that is what I have. I had somehow learned not to acknowledge (let alone respect) my own feelings, and to simply try harder at anything that was difficult. I had suffered psychosomatic symptoms for years, with my repeated, severe, sore throats seemingly being my body’s way of finally forcing me to stop ignoring the emotional messages of distress my mind was sending me.
I also want to offer a message of hope: determination has paid off for me. After my last episode, I learned a technique called mindfulness-based stress reduction, and it has improved my life significantly, both day-to-day, and in reducing both the severity of my symptoms and how long I experience them after something knocks me off balance. Also, I have had hardly any sore throats (one of which was a bout of Covid…) in nearly a decade, despite that time span including the stresses of moving out of my home country for the first time in my life, consequently losing my previous career, then the emotional impact of the Covid pandemic, and losing my work again! And here I am, more than two decades after I abandoned my first attempt, now attempting a PhD on a topic that matches my experience better, under a supervisor with a track record of success, in a setting where I am offered lots of academic support.
Indeed, I am now in such a healthy position that yesterday I finished an initial meeting about this mental health project, during which I talked about the very worst moments in my life, and just 30 minutes later was calmly discussing an intellectual PhD problem on which I was lost. An achievement 24-year-old me could never have imagined was possible.
- Jon, graduate student