Ep1_Voices of Academia_Why an academic mental health podcast?
Ep1_Voices of Academia_Why an academic mental health podcast?: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix
Ep1_Voices of Academia_Why an academic mental health podcast?: this wav audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Emily (host):
Academia is rewarding, but it's also a huge challenge. It's too easy to feel invisible. Please, let's just talk about it. All the difficult things you think you have to hide. I'm Emily and this is the Voices of Academia podcast. Each month you'll hear a conversation with a different researcher released in fortnightly episodes.
Emily (host):
First, you'll hear the story of mental health in academia. Then you'll learn how the experience was managed. You realize that actually you're not alone.
Emily (host):
There's a global community of researchers that want to talk about how hard this is and how it could be better.
Emily (host):
Hello and welcome to our very first episode of Voices of Academia. I'm your host, Emily King. Hi. For our very first episode, we thought we'd do something a bit different. We want you to make the Voices of Academia team. We want you to get to know who we are, what Voices of Academia does and why we're here. I'll start with a summary of our goals and structure, then you'll hear why this is important to us, why we think it's necessary, some of our own wellness suggestions, and finally how you can get involved. Marissa Kate, Zoë Ayres and myself met on academic Twitter. We're researchers at different stages in a range of fields and even from different countries. We came together because of a joint passion for improving academic mental health. Voices of Academia is currently a Twitter account, blog and now podcast where we volunteer to provide a platform for you, the global academic community, to share mental health and wellness stories. We feel strongly that sharing honest accounts of life in academia is critical to the development of a healthy, supportive and realistic academic culture for all of us. Voices of Academia aims to normalise conversations about mental health and mental illness in academia. We know that many people, just like you, experience mental health concerns and we can support each other by sharing different wellness strategies. Here's why we do it.
Zoë:
I'm so excited about this podcast. Thanks so much Emily for agreeing to be the host of Voices of Academia, the podcast. I think it's going to be awesome. It makes sense to start with you. Could you tell us why you decided to get involved with Voices of Academia and what's motivated you to join the Voices of Academia team and also a little bit about why mental health is important to you?
Emily (host):
I took over a year off my PhD because of the mental illness and I felt quite alone and I didn't really know who to talk to within academia. And as much as my supervisors suggested I take that time off, they didn't know how to handle it. They let me decide and they said, when you're ready to come back we are here, which I think is reasonably appropriate, but it just meant that I had this big disconnect from that whole academic environment and I'd been having panic attacks going in on the bus to get to where I couldn't be anywhere near the institution at all. And so I really needed someone to help support me to get back there. And I'm really lucky that I have that in the form of the graduate research coordinator. He reached out to me when I put in my final leave because I just kept putting in leave, putting in leave and got to the point where I put in my final leave. That was all that I was allocated as part of my program.
Emily (host):
And the research coordinator emailed me and said, Oh, you've just put in the last leave you can ask for. I'm just wondering if there's something that you know that we can help you with. I'd really like to know any problems that you from experiencing this your degree.
Emily (host):
And he invited me to come and have a chat to him. And long story short, he's the reason why I went back. He happens to be a trauma researcher.
Emily (host):
And so he knew he knew that I needed it to be very, very gentle. He knew that it needed to be very stepwise. We knew I needed a lot of support, my supervisors, a great people. And I think they can do it in the way that they knew how.
Emily (host):
And it could have been handled much, much, much worse. But I think it could have been handled better too.
Emily (host):
And so I guess part of why this is so important to me is because I think that there can be a little bit better training for people within academia that are in management positions to help support people that are struggling so that they don't feel isolated and feel like withdrawing is their only option. I am interested in becoming a part of the Voices of Academia because I know that there are lots of people that are sort of telling their stories of what they're going through, which I think is a really helpful educational tool. I think it'll help to generate ideas about how this is happening on a global scale.
Emily (host):
I think it'll also kind of give me a little bit more confidence to push forward in this area in my own future potential career, because I'll have a better idea of not just my own experience, but the experiences of others. And I think that would be really powerful for me to be able to make some future potential change.
Zoë:
Such a powerful story. We're really glad to have you on board.
Marissa:
Yeah, definitely.
Zoë:
Marissa, how about you? Like, why Voices of Academia? And why now?
Marissa:
I completed my PhD eight years ago now, and I know what it's like to experience stresses during that time.
Marissa:
I think that most of us in the academic community at Twitter understand what that's like. And I've also been lucky enough to get a continuing or tenured position. And I think the pre-tenure process is enormously stressful, so I feel like I have lived experience of understanding the difficulties and the stresses and the fact that both of those periods increase your risk of developing a mental illness. You're under intense pressure all the time. And I think voices of academia is important because we want to hear from people about their individual stories. We have the statistics, as we've said, we know the numbers of people in academia generally who are struggling, but we want to hear those individual voices as well.
Zoë:
I completely agree. And I think that's kind of why we connect isn't it in terms of what we're doing. And for me, for my like my Ph.D. Experience, it kind of set me on a cascade and like set me on this trajectory with mental health in a way that I never expected before my Ph.D. I'd never experienced mental illness before in any way. And I found myself at a time point where I was experiencing daily suicidal ideation.
Zoë:
There was a time point I made a choice to stay. And for me, that's been a real journey from there that I realized that mental health and with Ph.D. students is not. You know, I wasn't alone. It wasn't only me experiencing that and that there are a whole host of people out there that experience this and it doesn't go away after the Ph.D. In fact, the pressures in some senses get worse. And so it really put me on like this, kind of trajectory with my mental health work. Like I started making my mental health posters and I remember making my first poster for Royal Society of Chemistry poster competition, which was meant to be for research. And I remember doing it for mental health thinking like, oh, should I submit this? It was actually a really weird day for me as well, because the competition fell on the day that my husband was having kidney surgery and he was having one of his kidneys removed. So I was in the hospital like, do I post on Twitter? Like I'm waiting around for my husband to get out of surgery. And I remember thinking, oh, gosh, this is so stressful, I'm not going to do that. And I was waiting and I'm so glad I did because it made me realize just how much people were interested in actually hearing about mental health.
Zoë:
And I didn't expect myself to be able to make such a big drop in the ocean, you know. And so when I did that poster realized that people were interested, I was like, oh, gosh, I actually have a format here and I can start doing more of this stuff. And as I started doing my posters, I realized that one of the things I really wasn't doing was actually capturing that individual experience. A lot of what I do with my posters is the understanding of statistics, understanding of the 10 key stresses that a Ph.D. student might face. Yeah, they're the 10 key stresses. But about the two hundred other ones that people experience that I can't summarize neatly in a poster is messy. Mental health is messy. And so I think pieces of academia just allows us to to look at those individual stories and make sure people don't feel alone and that their whole experience is just shoved under one overarching category when actually there's a lot more nuance to it than that. So that's why I'm doing it.
Emily (host):
Let's take a quick break.
Emily (host):
Welcome back. These are some snippets from a long discussion we had back in September about the state of academia, publications are still critical to academic career development, but social media is expanding our reach and impact as researchers. In our case, the Voices of Academia blog is already having an impact less than a year after its launch. We also talk about some of our own experiences and how we wish something like voices of academia existed for us when we were struggling.
Marissa:
It was an article that was published recently in one of our top journals in business, and it talked about the fact that increasingly researchers are publishing because they have to and lots of articles that are being published, aren't even being cited. They aren't being read. And I think that this increasing pressure that we're getting from the top of different schools, and I imagine it's the same in science, there are lots of papers that are coming out that that aren't really having an impact. And I think that impact is something that is being redefined in academia, which I think is really important, at least in my discipline. We're starting to consider, well, you might have written a journal article, but has it been read? Has it been cited? Has it had a meaningful impact on the way that people think or the way that organizations operate? Has it changed people's behaviour? And I think that's something that we need to think about more broadly. Is our work having impact? Like with our blog, I'm really proud of the fact that Zoe and I have created something that people we know people are reading it. We know people are retweeting it. We know that people are they're finding that the articles are resonating with them. And to me, that is what impact is. It's not necessarily getting an article in a top journal that may not be read and may not be cited by academics. And I think that that's the real beauty, especially of social media. You can see where your work is having an impact and you can get feedback from people about the fact that, yes, I read this blog and it's changed the way that I think in the way that maybe the way that I structure my work day. And Zoë I think you've had experiences with people who who told you how much your work has impacted them?
Zoë:
I, yeah. And recently someone messaged me and said, like, effectively, this is not verbatim, but they were like, oh, you've you've saved my life because of some of the work that you've done. And I just I was staggered. And I think that's the thing. Coming back to success with mental health work, if you can help one person, I think that is success enough.
Zoë:
And I think with voices of academia, what we're doing is we're not just covering one angle of mental health within academia. What we're doing is providing people a voice so that they can actually speak about their experiences where in another situation they're just a statistic.
Zoë:
And everyone has a nuance to their mental health experience. And not everyone's experience of imposter syndrome, for example, is going to be exactly the same. And so what we do then is actually provide a way to capture this nuance and actually empower people to be able to speak out about their experiences.
Emily (host):
So that was actually something that I kind of wanted to talk about a little bit, because Zoë I know, we worked out that both of us kind of knew the statistics of mental illness before we went into our programs, I think. And I was determined. I was like, "all right, I know the information. I'm not going to become a statistic". And I somehow thought that by knowing it, that would prevent it from happening. And it just didn't. And yeah, I think Voices of Academia are so important because a lot of what happened to me, I didn't know what was happening because I'd never read about it before.
Emily (host):
I'd never heard about it before. No one was talking about it. And maybe it's a little bit strange that I didn't really know what anxiety was or what it felt like at the age of whatever it was, mid-twenties when I started my day. Maybe that's weird, but I really did. And in the first week of my Ph.D., I was really dizzy. I was really nauseous and I had to walk to the back and leave a seminar. And I was sitting there at a table and I couldn't get up. One of my supervisors came up to me at the end was like, All right, let's go. And I was like, I can't get up. I'm going to I can't stand up. Like I can't walk. And I said, I'm really dizzy. I just feel really nauseous. I don't really know what's happening. And he went and got me some water, came back and sort of sat with me for a while until I was able to go downstairs. But we thought at one point he was like, am I do I need to take you to the hospital, too? I need to take you to the hospital in the first day. And he's lovely. Like, he's always been very supportive, but I just have no idea that it was anxiety. And I didn't know until two years later I was sort of looking back on it like huh?
Zoë:
And it's stunning to me that so many of us experience things like anxiety and depression. And like quite often the physical side of those illnesses don't get talked about. For me, so I got diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome during my Ph.D. And like for some reason, like all my stress comes out with my gut and I don't know, like if I'm having a stressful time, it's like, oh gosh, OK, well, there's no point in me going to that meeting because I can't go to that meeting. Right? And I it's one of those things where, like, we just don't talk about it because I think it's like, again, it's an extra layer of taboo. And I'm just like, oh gosh. Like, let's just talk about it and make it normal. And we had like entries about panic attacks on the blog. And I've never experienced a panic attack myself, but I'm reading through that now. I understand kind of roughly what a panic attack would feel like. And I think I'd be able to recognize that maybe I. I don't think I could deal with it, probably. I mean, they sound horrific, but I think that by reading people's experiences, you can then kind of start to understand what those experiences are like a little bit and also then help people. If you then see them experiencing that, you actually kind of know what that person might need. And I think, again, that's kind of like trying to build the supportive network of people that you can actually help others around you.
Zoë:
Us three would never have met, I don't think, if it wasn't for Twitter. So it's one of those things, isn't it, where it allows you. I think the academic scenario is very different now than it would have been ten years ago, because you can connect in a very different way. And it's not like we're having to buy each other whiskeys at conferences sort of thing. That kind of old boy club is kind of disappearing and you can connect in a different way. So which I quite like.
Marissa:
Yeah, I agree. I think that social media is something that we could utilize more as academics. I think that those of us who do tweet a lot, we can see how valuable it is. I think that if you're really passionate about something, especially like mental health, it's such a huge resource and it's such a big support network. And just having that validation from other people who are willing to talk about their experiences is really important. And it's something that I think we need to strive for more because there's a real sense of support that I feel at Twitter that I don't necessarily feel at conferences, for example.
Zoë:
I wish I'd had Twitter during my day. I felt so alone when I was really struggling and I felt very guilty about having depression when I had such a good and strong support network around me, like everything on paper was pretty much OK. My supervisor's always been a good mentor to me, my family and my friends all around me. I could speak to them if I chose to. My husband has been like my absolute rock and yet still experiencing depression and I felt really, really guilty about it. Now I just put it on Twitter and be like, Oh, this is how I felt. And I am quite open about things now. And I think it would have just been nice to maybe have seen some of that stuff online. And I think that's what I try to do now, is I try and very much be the person that I would have liked to have seen during my PhD, because there is so much power in knowing you're not alone. And that kind of goes back to Voices of Academia with these personal stories, right? And how powerful that can be.
Marissa:
And this ties into a tweet that I made a couple of weeks ago about how you can be very high functioning. You can be hitting all of those performance targets. You can look like you're functioning on a surface level and doing really well, but you might be struggling a lot underneath. And we know that a lot of people, not only in academia, they are reluctant to speak up and to to acknowledge mental illness. And they do wear this mask. And there is a huge amount of emotional labour involved in putting on that front and going to work every day and being functional. And that resonated with a lot of people in the academic Twitter community. And this idea that often you don't know what people are going through, mental illness doesn't discriminate. One of my favourite sayings is we need to treat it like a physical illness because we know that in so many cases, yes, this situational depression. But there are also cases where you might need medication or you might need ECT or other interventions because it is your brain is unwell. And I think that if you can acknowledge that and acknowledge that you're deserving of help and that there's no shame in seeking help, I think that's something that obviously we need to encourage that.
Marissa:
And I don't want to use the medical model and say that every case of depression and anxiety is caused by serotonin levels and so forth, because we know that isn't the case. We know that sometimes it can develop from life events. But I think that that's one element that does need to be addressed. And regardless of the cause, if you're unwell because of a physical illness, if you've injured yourself somehow in an accident, you would seek help. If you're overcoming a significant life event and you're struggling, you should seek help. And medication isn't always the answer. Sometimes it is CBT, sometimes it is therapy. And using those self care strategies and being kinder to yourself, the bottom line is I think that in academia we do have this tendency just to keep functioning and not to acknowledge when we need help and hopefully the Voices of Academia and certainly the Twitter community, I think they've been a really big and really important part of changing that narrative.
Emily (host):
I agree because I know there's a lot of hesitation for people to come forward, and I definitely have that. I've always tried to hide everything that was going on. So I've had that mask on. And if I took a day off, I said that I got a cold. I was never asked about it. The only reason that I opened up to my supervisor about it was because I felt like at that particular point in time, I didn't really have any other choice because I needed him to be flexible in order for me to return. I needed to be some adaptations made. And I'm lucky that he responded really well and acknowledge that it was quite a brave thing to do. But I'd always avoided that. And I told him as to I said I'd avoided it because I thought it would harm my reputation. I thought that I wouldn't get promoted as a result of it. I thought that I wouldn't be put forward for certain opportunities as a result of it. And through this first aid course, they're trying to teach employers that it's more beneficial to hold onto an employee and make adaptations to help them manage their mental illness than it is to try and get a new employee. And kind of hard to work this, but I guess just educating people that just because someone struggling for a period and they're not able to perform the way that they're used to doesn't mean that you should kind of just get rid of them and you're going to have more success if you get someone else in that sort of well. I guess that's something that I definitely was worried about, sort of like, oh, my God, I can't do that right now. They're not going to want me. Like, I'm not useful to them. Why on earth are they going to make allowances for me? So come I'm not that important. I'm replaceable. It was really nice to read that in the first aid course, that that's something that employers are being educated about.
Emily (host):
Let's take a quick break.
Emily (host):
Welcome back, this final part of our first episode is from part of our discussion on the importance of training and education for academic wellness. We hope this is where Voices of Academia will sit. An educational resource in a variety of formats to help you understand what you might experience and how you can learn to manage.
Emily (host):
So, I'm doing a mental health first aid course at the moment. It's been started by a couple in Australia and I've sort of released it to a number of different organizations. I'm sort of doing the online component now and whenever we come out of lockdown in Melbourne, I'll do the face to face and get my qualification. But I think that's fantastic that there is more recognition of the fact that mental health can impact you physically and that it's really important to know how to respond to it. And we don't just need first aiders for physical health, we need first aiders for mental health as well, which can obviously have physical consequences. But I guess if you aren't aware of the underlying causes of those as a general physical first aider, then you wonder how to respond appropriately. I'm so happy that that's been made available at my institute that I could do that as a student. You know, I think it would be so valuable if at least one person in every research group could get that qualification because it helps you recognise some of the common signs and symptoms. It teaches you about the rates of different common mental health illnesses in well, in Australia, because it's an Australian program and different different ways that you can approach it. So they've got this acronym that sort of goes through exactly the same way as Doctor ABC, but it's a different acronym. So the different steps that you would take when you're approaching someone and trying to help them. And I really wish that someone in my research group would have that with me. But like I said, my supervisors were good. I noticed that I was a bit unwell and sort of encouraged that I took time off.
Zoë:
I think you hit on a really important thing there about training. I think the mental health first aid programs are amazing by the way. I think one of the things that supervisors don't often have is training on how to deal with mental health in general. And as you're saying, like recognising the signs is really, really important. And if people aren't trained in how to recognise the signs, then they're not going to be able to. And then you can't get that person specific help.
Zoë:
So I think there's a big role that the institutions play in this in making sure the supervisors get trained to actually be able to help people and recognise that mental illness is something that we really need to be on and be able to help people with.
Marissa:
I think it can be really difficult, though, to recognise those symptoms when we're often operating in an environment where we're always tired and we're always working so much. I'm just thinking back to my own experience. A couple of years ago, when I was finishing my PhD, I was teaching at the same time I was doing research projects, I was writing my dissertation and I was sleeping about five hours a night. I was waking up constantly. I don't know if it's widely known, but there is research showing that if you don't sleep even the next morning, your brain is just primed for anxiety. Sleep plays such an important role in regulating and helping you regulate emotions that if you wake up the next day and you haven't slept properly, you're going to be feeling overly anxious and slightly panicky. And for me, this went on for weeks and weeks and I was sleeping four to five hours a night and I was slowly deteriorating, largely because of the lack of sleep. And it becomes a very vicious cycle because you're more anxious. That means that you sleep less. And if you sleep less, you become even more anxious. And in retrospect, no one actually reached out for me because I was known at the time as a perfectionist who just worked a lot, got everything done, and I looked dead on my feet. But no one actually said, "Are you OK?" And I think, yeah, in retrospect, things like mental health, first aid training that would have been so helpful at the University of Queensland, we have a mental health champions network and these are people who are trained in mental health.
Marissa:
And it's a new initiative. And they're people that others can go to if they feel like they do need some additional support to get them pointed in the right direction. So mental health champions are not trained counsellors. They are not meant to be engaging in the counselling aspect, but they can point people toward resources. And importantly, they are trained in mental health first aid. And I think that making people more aware of the signs and the symptoms and maybe if you've noticed a change in someone. I know, I definitely looked more tired. I looked ragged, but no one really said, are you is something are you OK? Is something wrong? And I think that in retrospect, it would have been really helpful. And in the end, I ended up taking three or four weeks of leave and gradually my sleep normalized again. But it was an incredibly difficult time. And we know that people are going through this. We know that it does impact performance. It impacts relationships. It has a whole range of impacts on various aspects of life. And if we can talk more openly about mental illness and symptoms and signs, I think that would be a big step forward.
Emily (host):
So some research that I was looking at a couple of years ago indicated that at least in Australia, the two main reasons Ph.Ds withdrawal from that program is supervisor conflict or psychological distress. So definitely and I mean, that's not necessarily just lack of mentorship. Obviously, there are lots of reasons why that can be supervisor conflict. There's a program through Flinders University in Adelaide that I found out about. They were trying to incorporate elements of cognitive behavioural therapy into the PhD program. So I'm not sure if you're familiar with who Hugh Kearns. I think, well, workshops and he goes to universities all across the world teaching a number of different skills based on sort of high performance by using psychological principles. I think that is so crucial because we don't necessarily get a lot of that support from our direct supervisors or our colleagues or any of the other people around us. So to just have someone that's there training us, "okay you're probably going to doubt yourself. You're probably going to commit you're highly likely to be a perfectionist and you've always thought that was a great thing. But at this level, it's not necessarily a really great thing. These are some of the things that it can cause." I think having programs like that that run alongside Ph.D. students. It's duty of care for universities and research institutions to really make on a honours students, for undergraduates, Ph.D students, postdocs, everyone within the industry aware of what might happen on the high stress environments and how to manage that.
Emily (host):
It's crazy that we don't do that.
Zoë:
With your duty of care comment there. I had to kind of stop myself shouting yes over the audio. [laughing]
Emily (host):
And I mean, this comes back to exactly what I said. I was talking to my partner about the other day. People within academia is six times more likely to experience mental illness than the general population. And he's a mental health support worker and he has seen what's happened to me. And so he's sort of acutely aware that he wasn't as aware of how big it is within the industry. And he just got so angry and he was so stunned. And he said, how has it not been some sort of inquest into this? Like, how is it not being totally overhauled? This is ridiculous. You guys are meant to be the research minds, innovative minds that are sort of making new creations and you get paid really badly. You don't get enough support.
Emily (host):
Yeah, it's just crazy that this is such a big problem and nothing's really things are being done, but. But more needs to be done.
Marissa:
I think that also there's a real need for research, and this is a project that I'm involved with, with my team at the University of Queensland and actually looking at the numbers of Ph.D. students who are experiencing distress because there are lots of different studies. And I know there are some that say one in three students experiences distress during their candidature. There are others that say up to 40 percent of students meet the criteria for a diagnosable mental illness. But it's an area that still needs research, that needs attention to really get the statistics, I guess, to illustrate how many students are having a really difficult time, how many are having a great experience, because there are so many variations. And I think it's important to recognize that there will be some students who have a relatively smooth PhD experience.
Marissa:
They get their publications that are lucky enough to have a great supervisor. They might get a postdoc and it all goes well. But then we know that there are a lot of students who do struggle and identifying, really identifying what are the predictors of students who or the environment working at what predicts people who will struggle or develop a mental illness. That is what is so crucial. And I think that if we were to have some kind of inquest into what is happening in academia, I think that more of that research is needed because right now the evidence of it's anecdotal. We've got certain studies in specific disciplines. So I know a lot has come out of science. There hasn't been so much in the humanities. There hasn't been a lot of qualitative research. So it's all it's an emerging field. And I think that really to drive our agenda forward and to encourage people to seek support and encourage universities to implement that support, we need to have a better understanding of what's happening. And but I think that's happening. I think more and more people are paying attention to the doctoral student experience. It's really encouraging to see that there are much more papers coming out than there were five years ago. So I think that's emerging slowly.
Zoë:
I think is one of the reasons I'm involved with Dragonfly Mental Health, which is a not for profit that got up. It's only been around for about a year now. The aim is to really improve academic mental health as a whole. And I volunteer for it. So it's not not an advertisement or anything, but part of a Dragonfly Mental Health kind of aim is to have a research arm. So actually do the research to actually understand what the actual problems are to then correct those problems. Because as I as you said, there are other statistics out there. But again, there's a nuance to those statistics, depending on whether you're looking at the sciences or humanities and things. And that's why it's such a complex problem. I mean, if that was if there was a simple solution, we'd have done it already. I would like to think.
Emily (host):
I think that would be so helpful to see that research and coming back to what Zoë was saying before about some of the stats, you know, it is helpful to sort of understand that it's a problem. But I think having personal stories is going to be really powerful because people do have very different backgrounds and very different experiences. And so you might read some of those stories or hear some of those stories that you don't really relate to. And then there might be others that just really mirror your experience. And I think to be able to to read that and hear that would be so powerful for someone when they're going through it, because I, I found it comforting and I thought a little bit less alone when I read about how big a problem it is when I was going through it. But I certainly didn't read any personal stories. You know, I had the odd conversation with someone, but then we'd never talk again, selectees years. So I think this work is going to be a really important sort of stepping stone in that direction. But I think I agree more research needs to be done to tease out the different underlying causes of some of these problems.
Emily (host):
So if people are interested in getting involved with Voices of Academia, where can they do that?
Marissa:
So they can go to our website, which is VoicesOfAcademia.com. And there you will find all of our blogs posted to date, as well as submission guidelines and the process that we go through in looking for submissions. So often people will send us a short pitch on the topic that they would like to write about. We will essentially have a look and see whether it's a good fit with Voices of Academia. And we will then set up a deadline for them so that they can submit by that time. We usually try and lightly edit submissions if needed. Sometimes we are completely happy with them as is, but we do obviously like to check them to make sure that it fits with the purposes of the blog. And then we will set up a date for publication.
Emily (host):
If you're still here, thank you for listening to our first episode. Let us know what you thought of our team discussion and if you'd like to hear more at. This sometimes, for the most part, each month, you'll hear a conversation with a different researcher released in fortnightly episodes. First, you'll hear their story of mental health in academia. Then you'll learn how the experience was managed. We might also release an anonymous story episodes in the future. My aim as podcast host is to allow guests the freedom to speak openly about experiences as they feel comfortable. I don't want them to feel they have to censor parts of their story. These stories might be raw, heartbreaking or uplifting, but they're real. Join me on the next episode of Voices of Academia, where we'll meet our first guest, who since recording has become the latest addition to the Voices of Academia team. Next episode, we meet Syreeta Nolan.
Emily (host):
For information found this episode referr to the show notes will visit our website www.VoicesOfAcademia.com if this episode brought anything up for you. There are mental health resources and emergency numbers available for various countries at www.checkpointorg.com/global/ This podcast was written, hosted and produced by me, Emily, with support from some very special people in my life.
Emily (host):
You can find me on Twitter @EKing_Sci spelled SCI for science, but I'm part of the larger Voices of Academia team. We have a website, a Twitter account @AcademicVoices and also share stories in blog form with the option of them being anonymous. If you like this podcast and want to hear more stories please leave a review, subscribe, tell me what you think on Twitter and tell your friends. The podcast is available on Spotify, Apple podcasts and most other major listening platforms. You can also follow the Voices of Academia blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Just head to our Web site www.VoicesOfAcademia.com to sign up.
Emily (host):
If you have a mental health awareness story to share, we absolutely want to hear from you. Whether you're a team leader, research assistant, postdoc, student, ex-academic or any other type of researcher. Follow Academic Voices on Twitter will visit our website, www.VoicesofAcademia.com, the details on how to share your story.
Emily (host):
It's time someone gave you a voice.
Sonix is the world’s most advanced automated transcription, translation, and subtitling platform. Fast, accurate, and affordable.
Automatically convert your wav files to text (txt file), Microsoft Word (docx file), and SubRip Subtitle (srt file) in minutes.
Sonix has many features that you'd love including upload many different filetypes, automated translation, share transcripts, automatic transcription software, and easily transcribe your Zoom meetings. Try Sonix for free today.