Content Advisory: This episode features a discussion of mental health challenges and positive strategies to deal with mental health. There is a very brief mention of suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling with feelings of self-harm or suicidal thoughts, please reach out to the Seelesorge hotline in Germany at 0800 1110 111 or get emergency help by calling 112. Additional resources for mental health are available in the links below.

In this episode, we talk to Sandra Neumann of Scholar Minds about mental health during your doctorate. We’ll discuss how to manage the challenges of doing a doctorate and what strategies exist to help you! We’ll also learn more about Scholar Minds, a ECR-led initiative for mental health during the doctorate, and how you can get involved.

Highlights

„I think the most important message for us to convey is, please don’t [wait to] come to us when you are already suffering. Come to us when you feel like, „Oh, I’m not sure. I think I need, maybe I need to be there in a preventative manner.““

„I think mental health should be, call it however you want to call it, but should be part of a curriculum. It should be […] included in the PhD you’re doing, be it a graduate program that includes fixed courses or when you do an individual PhD“

from our interview with Sandra Neumann

Audio

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Transcript

Please note: This is a machine-generated translation that has been (minimally) edited for readability.

Welcome. We are here today with Sandra Neumann, a doctoral candidate at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain at Humboldt University, and she is one of the founders of Scholar Minds, which we are going to learn about more today.

Welcome. So the first question that I’d like to ask you is if you could tell us a little bit about Scholar Minds. What is it? And where did it start? And what do you do with your organization?

Yeah, Scholar Minds is actually an initiative which is nonprofit. And we founded ourselves pretty much at the start of the Corona Pandemic because we realized that a lot of people really were asking for events to talk about mental health and to make aware that people are suffering at home, especially during this very month of strict isolation.

And so Scholar Minds is an initiative from early career researchers, and we are really including postdocs here as well, who are in the early stages as well as PhD candidates. And we want to both have, or want to foster changes both on the individual level. Meaning that we want to approach early career researchers with talks and events, and at the same time also trying to make changes on the institutional level really, and try to talk to principal investigators, graduate schools on how to improve creating awareness for mental health really.

You’d mentioned this expectation survey and I would love to hear more about that and maybe you can fill us in on what that is.

Yeah, Scholar Minds has very different goals. I think the first goal that I already mentioned was that we want to create awareness for mental health, and we can do that through very many different things.

And one thing is like having events and then talking about mental health. And another aspect is to do surveys. And we actually did two surveys now, and I can talk about the first one because we are still analyzing the second one. And here we really looked into satisfaction with the PhD and mental wellbeing.

And we also looked into how was it before the pandemic versus how is it now? And I think just to name some of the findings that we have, is that within our sample we had approximately 16% who had a mental health disorder before starting the PhD. But what is alarming is that then 50% of these 15 had another diagnosis, which was connected to their PhD. So that really shows the vulnerability, really, that comes through being in this PhD program when not being equipped with the right competencies and maybe support for resilience. And what we also found is that, and I think that is really not surprising, and this is really built with other studies that are coming up now, is that the pandemic really decreased satisfaction with the PhD training and that the mental wellbeing also changed for the worse for over half of the sample. And I think when you talked about expectation management, one thing that we ask in the end, and this is very much the same in the first survey which we did in 2020, and the second one in 2021, is that we ask, „So you enter the PhD, and then how is it compared to what you expected?“

And here, actually over 60% say, „It’s actually worse. This experience that I thought I would have is actually worse than I thought it would be, being in this PhD training.“ And I think this really gives us insights on how to design these PhD programs and how to advertise them, to really give realistic expectations on what this PhD will be like. Maybe what are the working hours, what are things that you need to maybe be in interaction with your supervisor and so forth. So there are really so many implications from this question.

That’s really interesting, and when I think back, we have another podcast season where we interview PhD students and ask them about their PhD experience or graduates actually. And we asked them a little bit about, „What is the difference between what you expected and what you actually experienced?“ And so far, the answers have been everything. So that’s a very interesting study and I’m sure really useful in application.

So my next question for you is, what are some of the most common challenges that doctoral students face? What are they when they maybe when you guys interact with them or when you meet with doctoral students, or when you guys think about your own challenges, what are the challenges that they’re facing? And particularly, what about the environment is challenging? So being in the system or the structure of the PhD?

Yeah, I think that’s a really good question, and I think every stage of the PhD comes with its own challenges. I think the first challenge is, and this is connected to this expectation management, is when I start the PhD, what is really expected of me?

Should I work endlessly? How fast should I finish projects? Am I supposed to communicate with, like my colleagues? Should we work together? Should each individual work? And then really having this ratio of competition and collaboration and also this individual contract with your supervisor.

So what does your supervisor expect from you? And then going into the PhD and then thinking about, okay, you have to at some point finish and there are certain criteria that you need for finishing, which could be, for example, publishing. And that entails a certain timeline because it’s not that you submit something and then it’s published a week later.

So really then, during these long periods of being in publishing processes, which can be also in terms of becoming harsh criticism, to really being up for the challenge and really enduring the criticism you might receive. And then yeah, toward the end, just really seeing still the worst of the PhD work you did maybe throughout several years.

And then you know, who in these very challenging times, when it comes to working environment, who is the person you might potentially talk to about these problems? Can you talk to your supervisor or will the supervisor then potentially perceive you as weak or not up to the task? How open can you be about your own struggles?

So there are really lots of different challenges when it comes to the PhD.

I think that’s what you said. Just the last thing was really interesting because that’s something we would like to know. How do you approach colleagues or even your supervisor when you are having difficulties or challenges?

Can I ask for help? And maybe why do you think that’s such a challenging thing? You mentioned already, we don’t want our supervisors to think we’re weak or beyond that, what do you think makes that such a difficult thing for people to do and how can we overcome that?

I think the first thing is that in the academic world, now it’s known as the mental health crisis, so that in general, people are suffering more or coming out more with that they’re having a mental health problem, which is great, but it means that the system has to learn and also supervisors have to learn to deal with it.

But it’s not like having a physical problem where there’s something to fix it, and then you are basically fixed and healed. Having a mental health problem is way more difficult and way more delicate to approach. So as a supervisor, I can imagine it is very difficult to when someone tells me, I might face depression or anxiety.

So as a supervisor, what should I do? Should I, because I have to not only have the person in mind, but I have to have my lab in mind, my laboratory that I’m working in. So it’s very different factors. So the knowledge about what to do in these cases, should I provide help? Should I say maybe you need to find professional help, has this person already has professional help?

So it’s a topic that requires a lot of knowledge to deal with and I’m not sure that all like of the supervisors we have to talk to are already aware of how to actually deal with it. And then I think it’s very like super individual. Is this like a connection between a supervisor and a PhD candidate that happens once in a month? Is it something that happens weekly? So how much trust do I have in this relationship, to keep me safe in this relationship? And then to really be open and talk about the mental health problems.

So I think something that I find helpful is to, if I’m comfortable sharing it with someone, who would it be in this environment and maybe starting, for example, with a colleague that I feel comfortable with. So basically looking for allies because I think it also needs to be separated between. Are these mental health challenges that come up because I’m in this environment or are these mental health challenges that come up because of something else? Maybe I have problems with my partner. Maybe I have a physical problem that might have led to mental health challenges.

So I think it’s also important to discern that and really think about, okay, in that case, what do I actually need? And I think that’s also important to think about. Why, like what’s the reasoning for me to tell it? Do I need support in terms of do I actually don’t know how I can get support? Which could be quite likely when, for example, you do a PhD, but this is for example, not the country you’ve been grown up in and you don’t know about the system and so you’re actually looking for help or you just want to give a notice and say, „Hey, sometimes I’m not coming to the meetings because I have maybe social anxiety or something.“

So I’m looking for understanding. So what’s really the rationale, the rationale of why I’m doing this? Which is very difficult when you are in emergency situations. So sometimes it’s not clear from the beginning. But if it is, I would think about first, who is the first person I want to have? Do I need allies? And then the second thing we, what is basically, the reasoning of me telling it?

So that is, I think, really helpful because it’s something that we actually would advise a lot is if you’re having a problem and you want to address it, to think about what do I want from the other person? And I think that’s fantastic advice. You guys have mental health offers that you also offer. So one source of support could be my colleagues and my supervisors, but I could also go to Scholar Minds. What do you specifically offer? And what can I do? Say I am a PhD student who needs support? What can I get from you guys?

Yeah, so what we offer are mental health toolkits. And what that means is that we offer this, for example, for graduate schools where, for example, if you feel like maybe your graduate school could profit from this, if you can approach your graduate school and then your graduate school can contact us.

And then we offer this for groups of PhD candidates where, over the course of four weeks, we have four sessions. And then we talk about all kinds of things that are helpful to maintain your mental health because I think the most important message for us to convey is, please don’t come to us when you are already suffering. Come to us when you feel like, „Oh, I’m not sure. I think I need, maybe I need to be there in a preventative manner.“

Because if it’s already in a state where you are like, „I think I’m in a deep depression,“ then I think Scholar Minds can direct you to psychotherapy help. But this is really not what we do. We are more on the preventative side and to really make sure that you maintain your mental health. And in that sense, we are doing a lot of mindset exercises. So we are looking together at what our core beliefs in our work and maybe how to challenge them. And we are looking at imposter feelings, which in high-achieving individuals, such as many academics, are common feelings.

And we want to tackle them and think about how to. It’s not about losing these feelings, it’s more about finding acceptance with them and coping at points where they are very strong. And we’re also making exercises on why am I actually doing this PhD? What is the vision behind it? What is my goal in life? Is this PhD a step toward an academic career and do I want to follow that? Or is it one step and then the next step is a career in industry? Is it really necessary that I put all my heart and soul and time in it, or can there be a ratio because I have other things in life like my family, my friends, my personal development that also should have a space in there.

And then we also have really psychoeducation. So we are just talking about how do I recognize depression? How do I recognize anxiety? And because these are the most prevalent disorders among PhD candidates. And maybe how can I, if I am seeing that a colleague is not doing well, how can I approach a colleague really and ask if he or she’s not doing well?

That’s really interesting. So what would you suggest, maybe you could give us like a few really brief tips. Say, I noticed that my colleague is really struggling and I want to reach out to them and ask them maybe can I support them or I want to try and help them in some way. What would you suggest that I do?

I think the first thing is really to, when you offer to give help, I think first of all, it’s important to create a safe space where this person feels that he or she can talk about it. Maybe it’s not the right place in the office where everybody else is, or in the team meeting, but maybe it’s a place where you go for a walk and a coffee.

And if the person is comfortable sharing, then really it’s about listening. And it’s not about giving advice, if I were in your situation, this is what you have to do. No. It’s really about accepting, listening, and really asking the person if the person needs advice at this point, and not being afraid. I think some people have this misconception that when they ask, things will turn bad or worse, but the reality is that sometimes just having this open ear and just normalizing it can be really helpful already.

And then I think, this is what I said earlier, okay, now we are allies in that. And then what’s the best step for you to move forward because the person is the expert of his or her experiences. So we have to trust in that. Obviously, if and I think that’s a very serious topic, if thoughts and ideas of suicidal actions come up, then this is where the purely listening part stops. This is where you have to openly say, „Look, you told me this and that, and this is something where you are endangering your life.“

And this is basically where my only listening stops. And I think this is where we need to get someone professional. I can get you there. I can call, for example, an ambulance, but this is where you also have to protect yourself. I think this is the last part. When someone gives you this information, you have to still protect yourself first.

Because at the end of the day, you have to also make sure that you are not then going into a mental health crisis because you’re taking on all the burden of your colleagues.

I think that’s really important. What you’ve just said is also to protect yourself. And I think that is probably an important aspect in this environment and in academia where everyone is really maybe struggling and having a hard time, in some way or another. Is there a good way that you recommend approaching maybe a supervisor or a PI if you notice that, maybe you think that it would be really helpful for your team to have your toolkit or to get an intervention from you guys, but you’re not really sure how to address it with your supervisor?

Do you guys have suggestions on how to bring that up with the supervisor that’s maybe not as experienced or that doesn’t have as much knowledge as you mentioned earlier, which is really important in understanding how valuable this could be?

Yeah. I think one thing in general that we experience is that if we call it mental health, it gets way easier rejected. Instead, when we call it self-care and self-management, this is something that is easier digestible, and so this could be one way of phrasing it and saying, „Hey, I think we as a team may need some self-management. This could be helpful, something in this direction.“

And I think one thing we need to be really honest about is that this might always be challenging to talk about and to expect that it might be difficult and there might be a „no“ first, because then maybe the supervisor goes back into the team meetings and then realizes for him or herself, maybe actually we might need that. So maybe in one meeting, just planting a seed and then being very persistent about it. And just asking maybe again, and then also maybe showing the website again, asking for allies. So I think making this change, and this is something we as Initiative also more and more realized, making changes in terms of mental health is not something that comes overnight. It’s a process and like being open and talking about it, it’s just the first step. There are so many more steps to go.

When we spoke earlier, you mentioned this project or this idea that I really wanted to touch on while we’re talking and I think it connects to this idea of changing the way we think about mental health. And that is this idea of CVs of failure. And I think, as you mentioned earlier, one of the issues that we have with mental health in academia is really this pressure to do really well and to not make mistakes or to do things that aren’t perfect, or really this lack of, let’s say, space to fail. And maybe if you want to talk a little bit about the CVs of failures and maybe why it’s important for us to be aware of the fact that even successful people have failed.

So the event that we are doing once a month is called Growing Up in Science. And there we invite supervisors or principal investigators from the Berlin, the wider Berlin area, but we also had them from different countries now. Then we asked them to present their way from being a PhD candidate to becoming this principal investigator.

And we specifically asked to not show us their success stories, but show us how it really was. And this could entail, it was pure luck that I got into this position or I applied for 50 professorships and then I got one. Or it was just about the right time, because a new field opened up and this was my chance.

And there are so many different reasons and quite often, it makes this experience so much more enjoyable when you see that others struggle too, and that, I don’t know, principal investigators also took more than these three years to finish their PhDs and that there was family in between, that they got children and that they didn’t shift from country to country because they thought about this, but because life happened and it makes experiences. Yeah, so much more normalizing for everybody. And I mean, there is the saying that successful people have just failed more. And I think this is something that we also want to portray, is that, yeah, you will fail and it’s totally normal and you will learn from it. And even as a principal investigator or supervisor, you still make mistakes. We are not robots. We are all humans. And it makes it easier to talk about mistakes because I think in general, in academia, we don’t have a culture of being allowed to fail. I remember when I started my PhD, every email I wrote, I meticulously, I like spent hours and hours writing emails because I was so afraid to make a mistake.

And then I received emails back from people who are high up in the hierarchy, and I realized, okay, they also make mistakes. But there is not really this culture of being allowed to make a mistake. And I think what this series, we want to show is that it’s okay to make mistakes. Everybody failed and they still made it up the hierarchy.

Nonetheless, though, it doesn’t take away the fact that it is really difficult to come into these positions of being principal investigators because there is this bottleneck that there are not, at least in Germany, not enough positions. So I think this is something that still needs to be told here, that just because you failed doesn’t guarantee you’re gonna become a principal investigator. At least in Germany, that’s not just how it works.

Yeah, I think the statistics are 3% of PhD students become professors, or at least those are the ones that I have. I also think it helps, like you said, if you know that’s out there as opposed to being surprised when you learn about it, maybe right before you finish. Yeah. What do you think would have to change for people who are not getting support to get support? Maybe we mentioned this in an earlier conversation we had, and this is an issue of course we have across the board in our workshops and in our, I do a lot of mental health workshops as well, and the people who come, it’s self-selecting. So often the people who show up are, I always say, „You guys are the, you’re doing this already. You’re the ones with the gratitude journals and who are taking these classes,“ and it’s really hard to reach that group of people who aren’t looking for support. So what do you think would have to change to get those people to be involved?

Absolutely. I think that’s really a challenge to get these people in. I think mental health should be, call it however you want to call it, but should be part of a curriculum. It should be told, or it should be included in the PhD you’re doing, be it a graduate program that includes fixed courses or when you do an individual PhD, that like really.

Be it a course that you have to take, but it has to be something that is there throughout your PhD journey. I think what I found really helpful, what we had in the, I think, in the first year of our PhD, was that we had counseling. So regardless of what your needs were, you just had this counseling where you were asked, „How are you doing? What are your challenges?“ And this was there for everybody so that you really reach everyone. And I know we had this for one year. And then it wasn’t available anymore because it was too expensive. And if I could dream up a solution, I would say yes, we would need this every half year, every six months, for every PhD candidate.

And some people might be like, „Yeah, I’m doing my gratitude journals, I’m fine. I have it all covered.“ But there might be people who have not even realized that they have a problem or that they need support. So having this monitoring in a very valuing way, like always asking, „How are you doing? What are your next challenges?“ could already go a long way. If we could, for example, it could also be incorporated in a way that every lab has this. So there’s one person who is like the mental health advocate, and this person is then responsible for checking up every six months. But obviously, then you also have to pay for this.

So I think there is where the systemic, yeah, challenges come in, that these extracurricular activities also cost money.

That’s always the question. How do we convince the system to value different things that aren’t maybe just producing science? So I have one more question for you, and that is, I have two actually. The first one is, what haven’t I asked you that you think that I should have asked you? What do you think would be really important? Is there anything you want to share with the listeners?

I think I want to just maybe highlight it once more because I think I said it earlier, but I think I want to say it again, that mental health is not something that should become a topic when you feel like things are not going well. Mental health is something that, like your physical health, that you go to the gym for weekly, should also be a weekly appointment for you and should be a check-in, should be a walk, should be going to the sauna or having a massage. Anything that helps you to release stress and maintaining your mental health. I think this is something I want to give to the audience. If I could give myself advice, I would give that to myself.

That’s a question I also like to ask, what would you, if you could travel in time back to the beginning of your PhD, what would you tell yourself in that time? Maybe in relation to mental health?

Yeah. Work less, enjoy more. I think when I talk about expectation management, I think why it is such a topic to me is because I felt that in the beginning I wasn’t sure what was to be expected. And I think if someone would’ve told me, „Hey, it takes a lot of years anyways, and it doesn’t matter if you work 10 hours on it or eight hours on it, or 12 hours, then what?“ That would have been a big relief for me and that there are so many things in this process that I cannot control. And I think having this idea of these are things I can control and these are things that are not up to me and having this liberty of saying, okay, I, I choose tasks. There are things I have to do, but there are things I can choose and I’m not taking on everything. I’m taking on what I can take on. And that I am giving back responsibility to my principal investigator and saying, if I’m taking this task on, which other task should I then not do because I’m not able to do it in the time that I’m having? That would have been nice to have more of this self-confidence, which I have today, but I didn’t have six years ago.

I think that’s really interesting to hear and important because you can only do so many things in the day. So the last question I have for you is, how can people get involved in Scholar Minds? So maybe someone’s listening to this and they think, or they’re reading it and say, „I really want this sounds so cool. I want to do this.“ How do they get involved?

I think it’s very easy. Just contact us. We are on Twitter, Berlin dot minds. We are also on Instagram. You can Google us. Just Google Scholar minds and you will find us. We have a homepage and really you can, you can join and then decide if you want to organize events with us. We have a yearly mental health conference. If you’re interested in doing that or if you’re interested in giving those mental health toolkits or organizing growing up in science, or if you say, „Okay, no, I’m more interested in public outreach. I want to design tweets or Instagram posts,“ that’s also possible. So there are really many ways of being and helping us. So just reaching out and then we’ll see what, how it goes from there. So there’s really no pressure. It’s more about going for a goal together.

Cool. And maybe I’ll add because sometimes students ask me, „Oh, I don’t know if I could really do that. I don’t know, am I good enough or do I have enough knowledge, maybe I don’t know enough about it.“ It’s, I understand it’s okay to just contact you even if you’re not an expert.

Definitely. I’m a psychologist and like psychotherapist in training, but like a lot of the people that aren’t scholar mites have no professional connection to mental health whatsoever. And even if you only decide you want to come to the weekly meetings and be there, that’s also totally fine. We are open to anybody who just wants to make a change and wants to create awareness.

Thank you so much. So thank you for talking to us, for sharing your experience.

Thank you for the opportunity.

This interview was conducted by the co-host of our podcast Amanda Wichert