We Need to Talk About Researcher Wellbeing

A Brief Overview of Mental Health in Academia

Globally, there is growing awareness of issues related to mental health and the importance of addressing them in the general population, an awareness bolstered by mounting evidence from research. But, perhaps ironically, mental health concerns within academia itself have not traditionally been investigated.

Research has always been anecdotally known as a high-stress profession. Stories abound of individual struggles caused by the hyper-competitiveness within academia and the pressure to publish or acquire funds/grants, in addition to struggles caused by universal stressors such as social biases, discrimination, bullying, and harassment (e.g., see stories here).

Success in academia depends on multiple factors, and how individuals cope with the pressures of academia is an important influencing factor, if not a direct determinant of success. What these pressures are and how they affect researchers and the overall research enterprise received little attention until recently. Therefore, the growing interest in studying this topic is highly welcome.

So, what do we know so far about mental health in academia?

A large majority of the studies and surveys on this subject involve PhD students and early-career researchers, and these seem to confirm high stress levels and high risk of mental health issues among these individuals.

For example, a 2014 study involving graduate students from the University of California, Berkeley, found that about 47% of the PhD students “reached the threshold considered depressed,” although this was not based on clinical diagnosis. Among the top predictors of well-being were career prospects, self-reported physical health, living conditions, academic engagement, and social support.

A 2017 study involving PhD students from Belgium reported that almost a third of the students were either at risk of or developing a psychiatric disorder, a prevalence rate higher than that observed in comparison groups such as one comprising the highly educated in the general population. It also reported organizational policies as a factor significantly associated with mental health. Another noteworthy study published in Nature Biotechnology in 2018 also found a worrying pattern: the prevalence of moderate to severe anxiety and depression was six times higher in PhD and master’s students than in the general population.

Nature has been conducting biennial global surveys of PhD students for 10 years, seeking views from them on various aspects of their PhD experience. The results of the latest survey show that most respondents were satisfied with their decision to pursue a PhD, although the satisfaction level appears to be worsening compared to that in previous surveys. This satisfaction appeared to correlate with factors such as relationship with supervisor/principal investigator, number of publications, hours worked, guidance from advisor, and work–life balance. Further, the majority of respondents were dissatisfied with the long hours they worked, and more than a third reported having sought help for anxiety or depression. Around one-fifth of the respondents reported experiencing harassment, discrimination, or bullying, with gender and racial discrimination being the most common types of discrimination.

The story appears to be similar in surveys with a broader focus on academics in general, irrespective of their career stage. In a global survey of university staff conducted by Times Higher Education, 26% of female academics and 31% of male academics felt that their work negatively affected their mental health a lot, with many saying that they had heavy workloads and worked long hours.

Recurrent themes in all such surveys and studies emphasize that, while the nature of the research endeavor itself can trigger stress, equally important are the environment and culture in academia. The long work hours, measures of success, reward/recognition mechanisms, insufficient focus on inclusivity, or inadequate professional/personal support may seriously affect researcher well-being. The available body of work offers sufficient reason for universities, research institutes, and policy-making bodies to start noting the importance of this subject and take steps to ensure a positive research environment and experience for their academics.

Meanwhile, more extensive work is needed to gather hard evidence on the mental health status within academia and factors strongly correlated with it. What are the reasons why issues related to mental health are likely to be more prevalent within academia than in the general population? Are these issues universal across all geographies and various demographic groups? What impact can these issues have on science and the broad society? What types of research structures and organizational policies can alleviate these problems and have positive effects on researcher well-being and research quality?

To seek answers to some of these questions, Cactus Communications launched a survey on World Mental Health Day (October 10) 2019, inviting perspectives from researchers around the world on which aspects of their lives as researchers bring them joy and fulfilment, which cause them stress, and what organizations can do to ensure a positive research environment.

Why a Comprehensive Understanding of Mental Health in Academia Is Important

The idea for our survey on mental health took shape as we reflected on several factors. First, as a global scholarly communications organization over seventeen years old, we have been intimately aware of one of the major sources of stress for researchers: the constant and tremendous pressure to publish, and to publish in international, high–impact-factor journals. Numerous authors (especially those from non–English-speaking backgrounds) have shared with us the frustrations they experience when they have to write and plan their publication activities or deal with rejections, sometimes facing tight deadlines and lacking adequate support from their organizations/supervisors.

Second, a previous large-scale global author survey that we had conducted highlighted several other pain points related to academic publishing. Important among these were the long time taken to have a paper published in a journal and concerns around peer review quality/processes. Authors shared with us heartfelt and insightful comments on how these issues can affect their career progression in a hyper-competitive environment. Since publication success is typically used as an indirect measure of performance, publishing-related pressures can spawn other problems. Some authors shared with us their concerns around unscrupulous practices being adopted to exploit these pressures (e.g., predatory publishing) and the added stress of ensuring that they do not fall prey to these elements. The overwhelming response we received for that survey indicated how pervasive academic-publishing pressures were and how they form an important potential source of stress. But these still represent just one aspect of researchers’ lives.

Third, researchers have been separately sharing with us personal stories of their academic lives for publication on our forum for researchers: these include both success stories and stories of struggle. Some describe the routine challenges in academic work and affirm that a certain degree of stress comes with the territory. After all, being a good researcher does require a lot of patience, hard work, and willingness to embrace challenges pragmatically.

However, some stories emphasize that researchers are not solitary workers whose success is fueled only by their brilliance in an academic domain. They work within systems that create an environment or culture that can either facilitate their growth and academic endeavors or stymie them. Therefore, for researchers to succeed, they need to manage both inherent and environment-specific pressures existing within academia, not to mention pressures caused by personal life situations.

The problem begins when these pressures are considered the norm and researchers are expected to soldier on despite the damaging impact these can collectively have on them. The normalization of such stresses and lack of support in managing them makes it difficult for researchers to openly discuss how these may be affecting their well-being, as personal anecdotes like this one and this one demonstrate.

Finally, reports related to the state of well-being in academia are being released and have indicated, as we discussed in our previous article, that mental health concerns may be more prevalent in academia than in the general population. This makes it imperative to break the taboo around discussing these concerns and make efforts to understand them better.

Most discussions around mental health in academia so far focus on students or researchers in the early stages of their careers, and are seemingly concentrated in Western countries. But this is certainly a universal problem. Unfortunate stories of academics who struggle with work-related problems and are driven to suicide have been reported from around the world (for example, see this case, this one, and this one).

All of these factors prompted us to launch our survey. Our long and close association with the research community and our extensive global reach offer us the unique advantage of being able to access diverse researcher groups. Our survey covers a multitude of questions related to feelings of purpose/fulfilment, workplace-specific factors that researchers appreciate or are unhappy about, personal life situation, career progression, sources of support, willingness to seek professional counselling services if needed, access to these services, and reasons preventing researchers from using such services. Therefore, the survey results can help understand the problem at a global scale as well as among specific demographic groups and highlight the needs of each.

Among other things, we hope to obtain a rich collection of opinions from researchers on what they believe their organizations and decision-makers in academia can do to make research environments more positive. We believe such direct inputs will be particularly valuable to everyone in academia who is concerned about research quality as well as researcher well-being and is committed to improving both. Offering mental health support to those who need it is as important as it is to identify environment-specific causes of poor mental health.

How Universities and Research Institutes Can Ensure Researcher Wellbeing

Researcher well-being is both a personal priority for individual researchers and an organizational one for authorities and decision-makers in academia. So, what can universities and research institutes do to ensure researcher well-being?  

First, provide access to resources that can help researchers deal with their mental health concerns. Universities should ensure access to professional counselling or mental health services for researchers, either by establishing counselling centers within the organization or through tie-ups with mental health service providers. In addition, they should create awareness about these services among their students, researchers, and faculty, as well as foster an atmosphere that encourages those who need these services to use them.  

Many already do this, but this is not yet a norm globally. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the demand for mental health services on campus is likely to have increased in the past few years, as has been reported for universities in the U.K. and the U.S. 

Therefore, equitable access to such services should be a priority for universities and other authorities within academia worldwide. Each university would ideally need to assess (and regularly re-assess) the type and scope of services its community requires and how it can meet these requirements. Some have come up with innovative approaches of meeting these needs; for example, UCLA has introduced a mental health tracker to screen and track mental health issues among students. 

Several mental health advocacy or non-profit groups (such as National Alliance on Mental Illness, Active Minds, and Student Minds) have student-led chapters and peer-support groups on university campuses. Universities can encourage students to initiate such programs, as these can serve to both create awareness and direct students to appropriate resources. This is especially relevant if universities themselves cannot yet offer professional counselling services or if they wish to complement them. 

Second, identify and address possible workplace-specific root causes of mental health problems. Universities, research institutes, and larger overseeing bodies should assess how organizational systems and processes need to be adapted to create a sustainable, positive, and productive research environment. One such larger-level effort is a project initiated by The Royal Society, which aims at determining how it can promote a research culture that facilitates excellence in research and helps researchers flourish. While its focus is not mental health specifically, much of the work in this project touches upon factors critical to researcher well-being, such as career paths, recognition and reward, diversity/inclusion, and support for collaboration. More of such initiatives need to be undertaken globally rather than in silos, because many underlying causes of stress in academia are global in nature and interconnected. 

At the organization level, universities can gather inputs on what the status of well-being among their own researchers is, whether their researchers receive adequate support at their workplace, and what aspects of the work environment they appreciate or find challenging. Having concrete information of this type will help them identify how to shape their systems or processes to minimize stress triggers in their environments. 

The CACTUS Foundation’s global survey on mental health among researchers, which we’ve mentioned earlier in this series, aims to fill exactly these types of information gaps. Therefore, one of the immediate steps universities and research institutes can take toward ensuring researcher well-being is to sign up as a partner for this survey. By becoming partners, organizations will support a massive global initiative to address a major health concern within academia and receive international recognition as organizations committed to addressing it. 

Moreover, the primary benefit for any organization that signs up as a partner and actively disseminates this survey among its researchers is that it will receive customized reports. These reports will be based on the inputs shared specifically by its researchers, since the partner will be offered a custom link to collect survey responses from its researcher base (provided, of course, that a large enough sample of individuals from the organization has taken the survey). 

This will help the organization review patterns specific to its work environment and researchers and then compare them with overall global or regional patterns. For example, organizations can review whether their researchers are satisfied with the resources, mentorship, and support offered to them; whether their policies related to work–life balance, discrimination/bullying, and research ethics are considered effective; and how researchers typically deal with feelings of work-related stress. 

Furthermore, the custom reports can help review trends across different demographic groups within an organization (e.g., by tenure, career stage, discipline) for a comprehensive understanding of problems specifically affecting these groups. They can especially help understand the viewpoints of underrepresented groups and therefore design practices that foster inclusion and diversity. 

Given the breadth of topics this survey covers, the reports will offer important insights that can help organizations identify highly specific pain points and inform their decisions/policies related to researcher well-being. 

To learn more about this survey and how organizations can sign up as partners, click here.