Thursday, March 21, 2019

Mental health in academia

Even though I have not posted about it for a while, mental health continues to be on my radar. I monitor my own mental health carefully and generally things are going well. Tragically, I still meet many in academia struggling with the issue. It is also in the news because of the recent death by suicide of Princeton economist, Alan Krueger. A few months ago, Stanford theoretical physicist, Shoucheng Zhang, also died by suicide.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about how Krueger's death is prompting conversations about how the culture of academia can be unconducive to mental health.

Last week there was an excellent New York Times Opinion piece by Lisa Pryor
Mental Illness Isn’t All in Your Head 
A “formulation” gathers the biological, psychological and social factors that lead to a mental illness — and offers clues to the way out of suffering.

2 comments:

  1. This is very, very sad. Very sad! Thanks for pointing this out. I don't expect it, but I really hope their families and closest friends would gift the public details on how these tragedies unfolded, perhaps over the years, so that we can all learn and enforce steps now to prevent further academic suicides.

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  2. Stefan Grimm case is another from Imperial College UK is a very, very sad story. This web site gives all the information.

    http://www.dcscience.net/tag/stefan-grimm/

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