Crosspost: Encourage whistle-blowing: how universities can help to resolve research’s mental-health crisis

By the editors of Nature

Researchers working in academia are more likely to experience anxiety and depression than are members of the population at large, as we report in a Feature investigating the mental-health crisis in science. The COVID-19 pandemic has taken its toll on researchers, as it has on many in wider society, but it is clear that a major factor common in academia is a toxic work environment. 

Credit: Alamy 

A proliferation of short-term contracts, low salaries (particularly for early-career researchers), competitive working environments and pressure to publish are all contributors — but so are bullying, discrimination and harassment. Study after study has reported on the devastating effects that these behaviours can have, especially on under-represented groups such as women, people of colour, low-income students and members of sexual and gender minorities.

Regrettably, the finding that bullying and harassment are widespread in academia is not new, as reporting by Nature and other journals show. But few academic leaders seem to be doing much to solve the problem. 

Read more at

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01703-9

AASWomen Newsletter for November 22, 2019

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of November 22, 2019
eds: JoEllen McBride, Nicolle Zellner, Heather Flewelling, Maria Patterson, and Alessandra Aloisi

Henrietta Leavitt, from item 3

This week's issues:

1. Kick-off Post for Two-Body Problem Series

2. New Video Interview Series from the Europlanet Early Career and Diversity Committees

3. How Henrietta Swan Leavitt Helped Build a Yardstick to Measure the Universe

4. The Scientist Who First Showed Us The Double Helix: A Personal Look At Rosalind Franklin

5. Supporting Parents and Caregivers in Science, Engineering, and Medicine

6. The Long Road to Getting, and Keeping, More Women in Science

7. Navigating the 'Old Boys' Club' of Science, With a Friend

8. Why I'm not applying for promotion

9. Want more women and minorities in STEM? Address social oppression in the classroom, says new research

10. 5 Ways to Welcome Women to Computer Science

11. The mental health of PhD researchers demands urgent attention

12. Are you guilty of equity offset?

13. Job Opportunities

14. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

15. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

16. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

AASWomen Newsletter for September 06, 2019

AAS Committee on the Status of Women
Issue of September 06, 2019
eds: JoEllen McBride, Nicolle Zellner, Heather Flewelling, Maria Patterson, and Alessandra Aloisi

[We have a *new email address* for receiving submissions to the newsletter: aaswomen_at_lists.aas.org. An editor will reply with a confirmation of receipt. Please update us in your contacts, and thank you for your submissions. --eds.]

Mary Ward, from item 6

This week's issues:

1. AAS Board Reflections: Stuart Vogel

2. Astrophysicist releases kids book Under the Stars: Astrophysics for Bedtime to inspire a passion for STEM

3. Women Scientists Form a Policy Advocacy Network in the Mid-Atlantic

4. Fifteen tips to make scientific conferences more welcoming for everyone

5. Survival Tips For Women In Tech: Who else is the only woman on their dev team?

6. Mary Ward: Feminist famous as the first person to be killed in a car accident

7. New data analysis proves science is sexist

8. All-female robotics team wins major awards while slashing stereotypes of women, Latinos in STEM

9. Girls Would do Better in Maths and Science Tests if Exams Were Made Longer, Study Finds

10. A better future for graduate-student mental health

11. Make science PhDs more than just a training path for academia

12. Job Opportunities

13. How to Submit to the AASWomen Newsletter

14. How to Subscribe or Unsubscribe to the AASWomen Newsletter

15. Access to Past Issues of the AASWomen Newsletter

The Surprising Lessons Depression Taught Me

Today's guest post is by Nicole Cabrera Salazar. Nicole is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow at Georgia State University. She plans to pursue a career in science communication/outreach focusing on equity in STEM. 

Back in December I opened up about taking a break from writing my dissertation to focus on my mental health. As scary as it was to walk away from research, it turned out to be the right choice for me. Here, I highlight the lessons I learned during this difficult time.

1. Depression Lies

If you’ve never experienced depression, it can be hard to understand what it feels like. The best way I can describe it is that my brain was constantly lying to me. The very things that would have helped me overcome the depression were the things my brain was telling me to avoid. I withdrew from everyone around me, even though just a short phone call with my family would have made me feel better. I stayed in my apartment for days, when a brief walk outside would have lifted my spirits. My brain also said that I would never feel better. The hardest part was gathering the energy to actively fight those lies so I could start the process of getting better.

The Status of Mental Health in Planetary Science

This is a repost of Dr. Angela Zalucha's piece for the Women in Planetary Science Blog. Please see her original post here.

About Dr. Angela Zalucha: Angela Zalucha received her PhD in atmospheric science from MIT in 2010. She now works at the SETI Institute modeling the dynamics of planetary atmospheres. She currently lives in Boulder, CO where she enjoys skiing and volunteering in the clinic at the Humane Society of Boulder Valley.

I meant to write this article yesterday. That’s not a statement of procrastination. I suffer from depression, which was triggered a few years ago by events directly related to my career. The symptoms of depression are different from person to person. For me, I have to go lay in bed, in silence. Tasks like getting up to heat leftover pizza up in the microwave are insurmountable. So I wasn’t exactly up to the task of writing a blog article, even if it was about the condition I suffer from.

Taking a Mental Health Break from My Dissertation

Today's guest post is by Nicole Cabrera Salazar. Nicole is an NSF Graduate Research Fellow at Georgia State University. She plans to pursue a career in science communication/outreach focusing on equity in STEM. 

About a month ago, I got sick with a simple cold. I was in the middle of writing the third chapter of my dissertation and had just taken time off to get over another cold two weeks before. I was also behind on the timeline to defend my thesis next year, and more delays didn’t seem like the best idea. So I did what any other grad student in my position would: I tried to power through.

Ten days later, my cold was still going strong. I was worried because I had been waking up with panic attacks in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, hyperventilating and shaking uncontrollably. Sick, sleep deprived, and anxious, I gave in and went to the doctor. I burst into tears as soon as she came into the room. 

Grad School Blues

A few years back UC Berkeley did a study of the mental health of graduate students.  The results were quite astounding.

The study found that 67% of graduate students said they had felt hopeless at least once in the last year; 54% felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning; and nearly 10% said they had considered suicide (note that in the graph below shows considering suicide "frequently" or "all the time", thus the percentage difference).  Female respondents were more likely to report feeling hopeless, exhausted, sad, depressed, or suicidal. By comparison, an estimated 9.5% of American adults suffer from depressive disorders, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.