How 4 Professors Built Careers Despite Mental-Health Struggles

Given that the mind is the bedrock of a career in academe, scholars with a mental illness, neurobiological disorder, or learning disorder often find themselves struggling in silence. They’re afraid that revealing a condition like depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsiveness, or autism spectrum disorder will cast them as lesser than their colleagues without such problems.

For tenure candidates, that fear is heightened. “To get tenure, you build this edifice of perfection,” says John W. Belcher, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has written about his depression. “Certainly being clinically depressed does not go along with that image.”

The situation is even more troubling for faculty members who work outside the tenure system — a majority of the professoriate — since they have less job security and may lack health insurance.

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“People ask me whether they should say that they have mental illness publicly, and I say, ‘Not unless you have tenure,’ " says James T.R. Jones, a law professor at the University of Louisville, who has bipolar disorder.

Professors like Mr. Belcher and Mr. Jones are on a mission to reduce the stigma of such conditions by discussing their stories publicly, whether in class; in blog posts, books, or newspaper columns; or at public events. Embedded in such stories are episodes both minor and significant: perhaps a few minutes of inner turmoil that pass quickly, or something bad enough for the professor to cancel class. Some scholars have to take a leave of absence to seek treatment.

Eric Anthony Grollman, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Richmond, was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder during graduate school and decided not to apply for tenure-track jobs at major research universities because of the added pressure to publish.

When Elyn R. Saks, a law professor at the University of Southern California, was teaching regularly, she never missed a class because of her schizophrenic symptoms, she says. But she had to keep her condition under wraps at times: “Psychosis isn’t like an on-off switch.”

Ms. Saks published a memoir about her schizophrenia in 2007, and two years later wrote an essay in The Chronicle about her illness. While the response ended up being overwhelmingly positive, she says, one administrator told her, after she published her book, that she would be “a pariah, an outcast.”

Many academics say a combination of therapy, medication, and support from friends, family, and colleagues has helped them cope. Some caution that deciding whether or not to disclose a condition depends on the culture within a department and administration. But a number of professors have found that publicly discussing their ordeals has helped lessen the stigma.

The Chronicle spoke with several professors who have struggled with mental illness and neurobiological disorders while making their way up the academic ladder. Here are their stories.

James T.R. Jones, professor at the University of Louisville’s Brandeis School of Law

Mr. Jones kept his bipolar disorder quiet for 22 years. When he was diagnosed, in 1986, mental illness involved too much of a stigma to talk about with colleagues or administrators, he says, particularly if you didn’t have tenure.

He took lithium to manage the symptoms until 2004. But shortly after going off of the drug, he had a breakdown. He was hospitalized multiple times over the next few months and had to take a semester-long leave of absence.

“Even when I came back, I was a total train wreck,” he says. “I’d been teaching there for over 20 years, but I couldn’t remember anything of what I’d been teaching.”

The law school’s dean at the time, Laura Rothstein, a leading disability-law expert, helped him secure medical leave with full pay. When he returned to teaching, she allowed him to ease back into his academic duties, teaching one class without any required service or research. Without her support, he says, “I wouldn’t have made it.”

His condition has prevented him from publishing as much as many other legal scholars, which slowed his progression up the tenure ladder, he says. “At times, it appeared as though I wasn’t working as hard as others. In fact, I was working extra hard. Sometimes just showing up on campus was very difficult.”

He published a memoir about his bipolar disorder in 2011, and sometimes he mentions his mental-health experiences in class — as he did during a discussion about the case of John Hinckley Jr., who was found not guilty for reason of insanity after he shot President Ronald Reagan and three other men in 1981.

But Mr. Jones tries not to dwell on his own condition. “I don’t want students to think about me as the mentally ill professor,” he says. “I want to be a professor who happens to have severe mental illness.”

Barbara J. Jago, associate professor of communication arts at the University of New Hampshire at Manchester

In the fall of 2000, Ms. Jago was a relatively new assistant professor, just two years past her Ph.D., and spiraling into depression. For the first few weeks of the semester, she managed to get through most of her classes, canceling one or two when she felt overwhelmed. But then an administrator saw razor-blade marks on one of her wrists, she says.

Ms. Jago described her breakdown and subsequent medical leave from academe in a 2002 journal article. One peer reviewer suggested that she was putting her academic career at risk by writing about her mental illness before going up for tenure. But the article was part of her recovery process, she says: “It was an exercise in making sense for myself of what I’d gone through.”

Since then she has received tenure and has managed her condition through medication and therapy. There have been difficult times: In 2011, after an emergency appendectomy, she had another serious depressive episode and took a midsemester medical leave. Later that year, she slept right through a Thursday class she was supposed to teach, and didn’t arise for several days after that. That experience, too, led to a journal article.

Ms. Jago says she would never have preserved her career as a professor without the help of her colleagues, who stepped in during both absences to cover her classes. They have also accommodated her in other ways. For instance, she prefers not to teach at night, because it can trigger depression. “It throws off my sleep patterns, which sends me off the edge,” she says. That’s tough on a campus like Manchester, where many working students commute to class after 5 p.m. But she says faculty members in the communication arts program “have been very understanding of that.”

Peter Smagorinsky, professor of English education at the University of Georgia

If you use the word “disability” when talking about emotional and cognitive issues with Mr. Smagorinsky, he’ll call you on it. He sees his autism spectrum disorder, obsessive compulsiveness, and anxiety as “enabling” in many ways, particularly in academe.

In the fall of 1999, Mr. Smagorinsky was an associate professor giving a presentation at an academic conference. He was comfortable talking about the material, and he knew almost everyone in the audience. But within a minute of taking the podium, his head was spinning, his heart racing. He was having a panic attack and couldn’t finish his talk.

The incident forced him to miss the rest of the semester and get medical help. “I had no place to hide,” he says.

Eventually he realized that he had symptoms of autism spectrum disorder, obsessive compulsiveness, and anxiety.

But he says his “makeup,” as he calls it, has improved his academic career, allowing him to be intensely focused on his work. Since he started publishing regularly in the 1980s, he has written, co-written, or edited 28 books, 120 journal articles, and 50 book chapters, he says. When students submit assignments and papers in his courses, he usually grades and returns them within a day or two, he adds.

There are times, though, when his conditions can be disabling. “Wherever I’ve worked, I’ve heard the word ‘outspoken’ and ‘You’ve got no filter,’ " he says. “I can be direct and unpleasant if I’m in a conflict.” Those tendencies, he says, soured his relationship with a previous department chair.

Paul L. Thomas II, associate professor of English education at Furman University

Mr. Thomas believes he has experienced symptoms of anxiety disorder for much of his life. But he wasn’t clinically diagnosed until 1999, the year after he received his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina. He had sought help after several panic attacks.

He arrived at Furman in 2002 as a tenure-track professor, while taking medication and going to therapy to deal with his anxiety, but he kept the condition under wraps until three or four years ago. While he says he no longer takes medication, the condition continues to affect his academic career. He doesn’t fly on planes, for example, because he says his anxiety would go into overdrive.

“I’m really embarrassed by this,” he says, noting that he must decline invitations to academic conferences and events that require plane travel.

Mr. Thomas often finds himself trying to compensate. Academe, in his opinion, is so focused on logic and rational thought that there’s little tolerance for perceived emotional weakness. “A psychological challenge like anxiety — especially as a man and as an academic, you’re afraid that it poses you as weak or inadequate,” he says.

In the classroom, he acknowledges, he has “a really abrasive teaching persona.” That style stems mostly from “finding a character that would hide how insecure I am, and how I’m actually an introvert.”

But he is passionate about teaching and enjoys interacting with students. Those situations don’t generally make him anxious. It’s other aspects of academe — especially occasions like department meetings and commencement ceremonies — that make him feel trapped.

“For me the formalities of academia are a nightmare,” he says. “It’s just exhausting.”