Mental Health in Academia

This past week noted two tragic deaths, united by a common, deadly disease. Early Tuesday morning, the body of a woman in her 30s was found on the sidewalk of our street a few doors down from my house—she had apparently ended her own life. Fashion designer L’Wren Scott, age 49, also took her own life last Monday. One woman, alone and unknown except by her family and friends; the other, a wealthy, accomplished international figure with a famous rock-star boyfriend. If this doesn’t exemplify the universal nature of depression and its deadly effects, I don’t know what does.

We don’t often talk about mental health in academia, but probably we should. According to a recent article, the majority of graduate students report feeling depressed, anxious, or overwhelmed at some point during their graduate careers. Twenty-seven percent of them seek support from mental health services on campus. One in ten of them contemplate suicide. While mental health issues certainly have a physiological component, they can be exacerbated by stress and isolation, two conditions which graduate school serves up in abundance.

Yet, the case studies mentioned in the article suggest that most of these graduate students are afraid to discuss their mental health situation with their advising professor or department chair. While the stigma associated with mental health issues is arguably less than it was in our parents’ generation, for example, it can still be considerable—and can prevent students from getting the help and support they need to navigate their responsibilities while preserving their health and safety. For that matter, it is likely that many faculty and staff at colleges and universities are dealing with their own mental health conditions, which they may be reluctant to share with their colleagues or supervisors for fear of the same stigma.

For example: when you hear the term, ‘mentally ill’, what is the first image that comes to mind? Is it a homeless person? Or a Yale law school graduate and chaired professor of law and psychiatry? Professor Elyn Saks provides an example of the latter. Watch the video at the link; it is inspiring and insightful. Note that Professor Saks, who is living with schizophrenia, lists three things as contributing to her ability to lead a happy and fulfilling professional life. The first is high-quality treatment, medication and psychiatric care—which our campus services should be providing to all of our faculty, staff, and students. The second is a supportive and loving network of family and friends who understand her condition and help her to navigate its symptoms. The third is a supportive work environment. We should take note of this last point: how can we support our colleagues and students with mental illness (whether depression, anxiety, PTSD, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, addiction, etc.) unless we are able to discuss it openly and honestly, without stigma?

I would like to make a final distinction here about supporting faculty and students who are living with mental health issues. This may sound as if doing so is for their sake, in order to cater to people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to ‘make it’ in academia—perhaps so that we don’t get sued for discrimination. Absolutely not! The contributions of people with diverse mental health conditions improve our academic inquiry. Look at Professor Saks’ example: the personal experience she had being restrained in a psychiatric hospital led her to pursue a line of legal research around how physical restraints are used. This work has the potential to improve thousands of peoples’ mental health care, and to save lives (as one to three people die while being restrained in the U.S. every week). Without Professor Saks’ unique experience and contributions, this research may not have been seen as important, let alone conducted. As I’ve argued on this blog before, diversity makes academia a better place, and improves our mission to conduct research that makes the world a better place in which to live.

So, to our colleagues and students living with mental illness: we support you, and we need you. Let us know how we can better help you to thrive. I think we all have a responsibility to educate ourselves about mental health and the resources available to help those living with mental health conditions (for example: do we know where our campus counseling services are located? Or the symptoms of depression, so that we might recognize them in our students? I confess that I need to learn more about this). Finally, to graduate students struggling with mental health challenges: please be aware that you are not alone, and reach out to someone who will be helpful and sympathetic. If your major advisor can’t fill this role, find another professor, peer, or mentor who can. No degree or career is worth the sacrifice of your health, including your mental health. Make taking care of yourself a top priority, and surround yourself with people who will support that priority.

My beef with food reform

A few years ago, Michael Pollan came to our campus and I got a ticket to hear him speak. I, like millions of others around the world, had been very impressed by the journalism and quality of writing he had applied to the problems with the American food system in his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. He is one of the key figures credited with pointing out that the ways in which we produce, process, and consume food in this country are unhealthy for people and for the environment.

After being introduced, Pollan walked onto the stage with a bag from Meijer, our regional grocery/superstore chain. I sometimes shop at Meijer, and many of my friends, colleagues and neighbors shop at Meijer—it’s one of the big names in our small Midwestern city.  

Pollan began pulling groceries out of the bag, and it quickly became clear that his intent was to use these items to mock the American food system. As I recall, the first thing he pulled out was some type of frozen breakfast that combined waffles, sausage and maybe egg in the same dish. Fair enough; the entire audience seemed to agree that it looked disgusting and un-natural. The next thing he pulled out was a tub of vanilla ice cream. Pollan pointed out that one of the recommendations he had made in his new book, In Defense of Food, was that people not buy foods with more than five ingredients. This particular ice cream brand marketed itself explicitly as having only five ingredients, and Pollan didn’t like that. At this point, I became a bit confused. This company is trying to make a less processed and more wholesome product, I thought. Isn’t that good? By the time Pollan was griping about an apple he had purchased at Meijer, I was fed up.

This sounds like a take-down of Pollan, but as I mentioned at the beginning, I still admire his journalism on the American food system. Rather, his demonstration symbolizes my problem with the movement to reform the way Americans eat, of which he is certainly not the only representative. We have started with an insightful systems analysis, which points out the ways in which U.S. agricultural and dietary policy, economic incentives, urban planning, and even school system design—as well as individual consumer choices—together produce unhealthy outcomes for people and the environment. We have then distilled that analysis to a highly individualized approach to fixing the food system that places the burden of this enormous task on individual families.

Specifically, on women. Because women still do approximately twice the amount of household cooking that men do, despite most of us now also working outside the home. It boggles my mind that this is an aspect of the food system that is almost never mentioned in talks about food reform.

To be honest, I didn’t fully understand the weight of this burden until I married, had a child, and began a 60+-hour a week job. Before these life transformations, I was just as likely as some of the most self-righteous foodies to wonder why people ‘don’t cook anymore’ in the U.S., and to think that it’s a matter of ‘education’. I agreed that there is no reason why we shouldn’t all be growing our own vegetables and cooking meals from scratch every night.

Then I confronted the reality of getting home at 6 p.m. after an exhausting day of meetings, teaching, and grading, finding the refrigerator empty, and having to contemplate dinner with a bawling toddler clinging to my leg. Pizza or takeout win out. Yes, you can use a slow cooker—if you have time in the morning to chop vegetables before rushing everyone out of the door. Yes, you can make a quick stirfry—if you have the ingredients on hand because you’ve been able to go to the grocery store in between getting home from a weekend conference and preparing for the work week. Yes, you can cook on the weekend—if you haven’t been at a conference. Yes, you can have your husband cook—if he’s not also out of town, or grinding away at a deadline.

My point is, if I, as an over-educated, relatively well-off consumer who cares about the environment and her family’s health find it hard to cook and eat well in the U.S., how much harder must it be for those who don’t have the privileges I have? We need to spread the burden for healthier food systems from individual families to the system itself. We need to make fresh, healthy food the default setting in the U.S., as it is in parts of Europe and Asia. The proliferation of farmers’ markets, food trucks, and the attempts of some grocery stores to stock local produce and healthy meal ingredients, are a great start. So is the support for more sustainable agriculture written into the most recent version of the Farm Bill (although not the cuts to food assistance programs). Urban agriculture is also great, although it may not be a reality for all families to participate.

So there are many good things being done, but here are some things I would like to see more of:

     1)  Men in the kitchen. And by that, I mean men taking responsibility for planning, shopping          for, and preparing healthy meals on weeknights, not just special occasions.

     2) More diverse voices in the food reform movement, particularly the voices of mothers—

     mothers working outside the home, poor mothers, and farming mothers.

     3) More healthy fast meal options (maybe food trucks can help here). Why are all of our fast  food options in the U.S. terribly unhealthy?

Finally, we need a more systemic approach to dealing with the problems of the American food system. Pollan was among the first prominent voices for this type of approach. As I’ve tried to point out above, changing the way we eat may involve changing the way we commute, work, live, and design our communities. A daunting task, to be sure—but so is making dinner some days.