Thirty years ago, Daniel Kmitta suffered his first of several major depressive episodes. He got help from his undergraduate college and, over time, learned how to manage his condition.
Then, several years into his first teaching job, at a midsize public university, he and his wife lost a child. That loss, coupled with his major depressive disorder, almost undid him. He felt isolated from his peers, he says, and was so wrapped up in the trauma that he never thought to reach out for help. Few colleagues noticed how much he needed it, he says. So in the wake of his child’s death, he trudged through teaching a summer course.
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Thirty years ago, Daniel Kmitta suffered his first of several major depressive episodes. He got help from his undergraduate college and, over time, learned how to manage his condition.
Then, several years into his first teaching job, at a midsize public university, he and his wife lost a child. That loss, coupled with his major depressive disorder, almost undid him. He felt isolated from his peers, he says, and was so wrapped up in the trauma that he never thought to reach out for help. Few colleagues noticed how much he needed it, he says. So in the wake of his child’s death, he trudged through teaching a summer course.
“I had no time to grieve,” says Mr. Kmitta, now an associate faculty member in education at Indiana University at South Bend.
After that summer, Mr. Kmitta resigned, and he and his wife moved somewhere new. Looking back, he says, everyone was probably just doing the best they could, but the mental-health support at the time was “minimal,” aside from the insurance that covered the cost of counseling.
Awareness of and advocacy for mental health on campuses have grown in recent years, especially for students. But many faculty members still deal with their problems in isolation.
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Most faculty members can receive some form of mental-health care through their college insurance plans, and some institutions also offer other resources, including employee-assistance programs and outside referrals. But readily available resources vary widely from campus to campus, college psychologists say, and few provide services that are dedicated to professors.
Junior faculty members and adjunct instructors can be particularly vulnerable to mental-health problems because of the kinds of stresses they face, as they build their case for tenure or search for full-time work in tough markets. As they navigate high-stakes moments in their careers, some professors feel pressure to hide those problems out of a fear that admitting to them will sink their prospects.
If you are honest about the problems that your brain sometimes causes, you’re worried about what your colleagues might think.
Many professors say a stigma around the discussion of their mental health still clings to the profession. Academics avoid discussing their problems because it could be interpreted as weakness, says Robert G. Moeller, a mental-health advocate and history professor at the University of California at Irvine.
“The main tool that academics have is our brains,” he says. “And if you are honest about the problems that your brain sometimes causes, you’re worried about what your colleagues might think.”
A Culture Shift
Some institutions are starting to pay more attention to the mental health of their faculty members, adding programs and training to reduce the stigma, to make resources easier to use, and to raise awareness of signs that someone else needs help.
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At Irvine, Mr. Moeller lobbied on and off for a decade to hire a counselor who would cater specifically to the faculty and staff. It’s difficult to get professors to seek help, he says, and he wanted the university to make it easier.
Eventually, he says, he found receptive administrators: Howard Gillman, Irvine’s chancellor, and Diane K. O’Dowd, Irvine’s vice provost for academic personnel.
They created a position — coordinator of faculty and staff mental-health care and respondent services — to help employees who need immediate action and then connect them to more-extensive resources like therapists and counseling outside the university, Mr. Moeller says. He hopes that having a “living, breathing human being” to talk to, instead of an outsourced 800 number on an insurance card to call, will embolden his peers to seek help.
Negar Shekarabi, a psychologist at Irvine who started as the coordinator in July, sees the job as equal parts outreach and intervention. She plans to instruct deans and department chairs on how to approach professors about sensitive topics like suicide, depression, and work-life balance. She hopes that by encouraging professors to talk and listen more, they will be as comfortable discussing their mental health as their physical health. Ideally, the climate will become more open and less guarded, she says.
“The goal is to create a culture shift,” Ms. Shekarabi says.
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Elsewhere, the University of Kentucky has prompted deans and department chairs to attend “gatekeeper trainings,” where participants learn to spot signs of trouble, such as self-harm, increased isolation, or rapid mood swings, and ask candid questions about suicide.
“It teaches people how to say, ‘Are you thinking about killing yourself?’ Because for most people, those words have never come out of their mouth in a way that is genuine,” says Julie Cerel, an associate professor of social work at the university and a licensed psychologist. She has used those words with some of her own colleagues, she says, and such inquiries can lead to interventions and continued dialogue about getting people help.
Individuals, too, can make a difference in the mental-health climate for their peers. For Peter Smagorinsky, a professor of English at the University of Georgia, being forthright about his own condition can be powerful. Mr. Smagorinsky did not recognize his mental-health issues until his daughter was briefly hospitalized. He was reading her chart, which detailed her obsessive-compulsive disorder, depressive tendencies, and Asperger syndrome, and he thought, “All of the things they’re saying about her are really a lot like me.”
Not only are there these mounting stressors in academia today, but opportunities to share those with somebody and being able to have a dialogue is often not there.
Nowadays he introduces himself to his undergraduates as “the mad professor” and sparks a discussion about mental health on the first day of class, an approach that allows students to open up about their own problems. And almost every time he gives a talk, he starts by acknowledging that he must take anti-anxiety medication to be able to speak publicly. Academics in the audience, he says, often confide that they were relieved to hear him say that.
“By coming forth and saying, ‘You know, I’ve got stuff that is part of me that I have to deal with,’ people tend to think it’s OK if they come out, too,” Mr. Smagorinsky says.
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Fear of Disclosure
Still, mental health remains a hard issue to tackle in academe, especially at institutions that expect professors to conduct research as well as teach.
This special report examines several workplace issues where strong communication is key, including anxiety over “campus carry” laws that allow students in some states to bring guns to class and a growing faculty effort to seek new ways of demonstrating the value of scholarly work. Read more.
Junior and adjunct faculty members, in particular, can fear speaking up when they suffer, often because of their taxing and volatile job conditions, says Mark S. Kaplan, a professor of social welfare at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Adjunct professors — who often cart themselves from college to college, and sometimes teach as many as five courses a day — have little job security, which exacerbates poor mental health, he says.
For full-time professors on the tenure track, the pursuit of tenure adds stress and sometimes self-doubt, with constant pressure to publish meaningful studies in respected journals, Mr. Kaplan says. At many institutions, professors face intense competition for federal research grants, as applications have increased and funding has plateaued.
Department chairs, who are often the first line of defense for their faculty members, can be ill equipped to broach topics like stress, burnout, and mental wellness, Mr. Kaplan says.
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“Not only are there these mounting stressors in academia today,” he says, “but opportunities to share those with somebody and being able to have a dialogue is often not there.”
All of those pressures increase worries about the ramifications of disclosing a mental illness and seeking help. One adjunct professor, who works at a large for-profit university, says she does not think she would have landed her current position if she had disclosed her major depression and post-traumatic stress.
The professor — who requested anonymity because she fears losing her job — does not discuss her condition with her supervisors or colleagues, even to admit when she needs help. “I think it would be used against me,” she says. As a recently divorced mother of two, she doesn’t have the option of saying something that might endanger her paycheck or her health insurance, she says.
“If I were giving my own children advice, I would tell them not to disclose,” she says, “unless they were millionaires.”
Paul L. Thomas, a professor of education at Furman University, says he has been able to be open with his colleagues and administrators about his pervasive anxiety, and his condition has not hurt him in the promotion process. But that did not mean they understood him.
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“That’s my remaining problem,” Mr. Thomas says. “Constantly having to explain myself and people being relatively cavalier.”
To mitigate his anxiety, Mr. Thomas says he does not fly, which he knows is irrational. Yet his colleagues constantly try to explain away his irrationality or to prescribe solutions. The discussions are “exhausting,” he says, and rarely lead to elevated understanding. As enlightened as academics think they are, he says, mental illness is still highly stigmatized.
Even though you get a pretty wide range of relatively sensitive people in higher education, I don’t think there’s any room to be flawed.
“Even though you get a pretty wide range of relatively sensitive people in higher education, I don’t think there’s any room to be flawed,” Mr. Thomas says.
Ingrained assumptions about the academic profession also dissuade faculty members from talking about their mental health, says Greg Gbur, a professor of physics and optical science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Academics tend to accept that “being miserable and stressed out is the default,” he says, instead of questioning the roots of their sadness and fatigue.
Mr. Gbur blogs about his clinical depression, but he was not always so forthcoming. He never concealed his depression from his peers, he says, but it’s not something “you run around and volunteer,” either. Once he got tenure, he started writing more because he felt he was “in a safer position to stick my neck out a little bit.”
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A Way Forward
Like Mr. Gbur, others in higher education are speaking out to spur awareness and lessen the stigma. This past spring, Santa J. Ono, now president of the University of British Columbia, publicized his own encounters with mental illness and emphasized the need for academe to do more.
Mr. Ono and his brother, Ken Ono, a professor of mathematics at Emory University, were both afflicted by mental illness when they faced pressures as young scholars.
And both see a more holistic approach to faculty mentorship, as well as simple acts of kindness among colleagues, as ways forward.
At most colleges, mentorship is treated as a means to help junior faculty members navigate promotions and tenure, says Ken Ono. Based on his experience, he says, that limited approach is misguided because emotional support is often what is most needed.
Beginning when he was a teenager, Mr. Ono heard voices that berated him for years. Those voices, he says, instilled in him an intense self-doubt that was still there as a graduate student and even as a young professor. While in graduate school, Mr. Ono attempted suicide after his first few conference presentations went poorly. He didn’t feel as if he fit into the academic profession. And, as a young professor, he says, he constantly questioned his role in the classroom when he felt he was not quite good enough.
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But throughout those experiences, Mr. Ono’s mentors worked to give him a sense of self-worth that he had never known before, he says, and that, more than anything else, helped him both as a professor and as a person. His mentors, he says, showed him “beauty in the world.”
They went on walks together, they read poetry, and they listened to Chopin. Mr. Ono and one of his primary mentors, Basil Gordon, a mathematician at UCLA, kept in touch every month until he passed away.
Santa Ono says he, too, was sheltered by his mentors when he was a young professor. As a junior faculty member doing biomedical research at the Johns Hopkins University, Mr. Ono says he felt pressure to bring in grants, especially because other people were counting on him for a paycheck. And that pressure morphed into intense anxiety, he says. What helped him through was attention from his mentors, who created a “cocoon” of support and warmth.
They checked in with him often. They pointed him toward resources. “And they showed me some love,” Mr. Ono says. “All you need to do is show people who are having a tough time some love.”
Correction (9/2/2016, 4:08 p.m.): This article originally misidentified Paul L. Thomas as an associate professor of English. His discipline is education, and he is a full professor. The article has been updated to reflect that.
EmmaPettit is a senior reporter at The Chronicle who covers the ways people within higher ed work and live — whether strange, funny, harmful, or hopeful. She’s also interested in political interference on campus, as well as overlooked crevices of academe, such as a scrappy puppetry program at an R1 university and a charmed football team at a Kansas community college. Follow her on Twitter at @EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pettit@chronicle.com.