Five Areas Therapy Can Support You During Your PhD Journey

It’s far from a secret that the environment and landscape of academia has not been created and maintained to be beneficial for mental health and wellbeing.

Therefore it makes so much sense that you may not be doing and feeling your best having been in that sphere for years (although weeks is probably enough to worsen the state of your mental health and wellbeing depending on your university, department, lab / research centre, and cohort).

Research from the 2020’s alone show there is a documented decline in the mental health of doctoral students and PhD researchers.

So how can therapy help when the systems are designed and function in the way they do?

The Orchard can support Washington state residents who are at any stage of their PhD or doctoral research in virtual sessions with these five areas, and beyond.

Five areas therapy can support your during your PhD journey:

• Process the impact your data or research has had on you

  There is a common misconception about research as being objective, that who the researcher is doesn’t matter and that what the data or research narrative becomes couldn’t or shouldn’t impact the student or researcher. However, as a human being, you’re allowed to be impacted by things. You’re allowed to be affected by your findings, by your participants, by the data.

  This may be an area that you and your department / advisor / supervisor / committee may not agree. You may not feel safe enough or secure enough in your position to challenge a dominant narrative in academia, and that’s alright. Intellectualizers can have an aversion to feeling feelings, and you may feel compelled to suppress or control your emotions with certain people in your professional environment because of that. You still deserve space to feel through and process through the impact the work you are doing is having. Therapy can be an important support for you in this.

• Pressure to publish and perish

  While we may not be able to change the expectations of publishing during a PhD in therapy, we can work on narratives and stories from your past education experiences that may be making working on manuscripts even harder for you. Think about labels like ‘talented and gifted’ or ‘high-achieving” or self-esteem tied to productivity or approval of authority figures or having to ‘prove’ yourself / ‘prove’ that you can do it. These are things we can unpack, explore, and heal in therapy together.

• Comparison

  It is an incredibly individual journey, a PhD. Yet you’re surrounded by other people who are doing the same type of work as you, at the same level, and that can set in motion some self-worth or self-esteem spirals. It may also be that you see folks on social media doing PhDs and you compare their progress to yours and start to feel a type of way about that. You may also be pit against your cohort or lab-mates for authorship, conference presentations, and awards - direct evidence of comparison that lives in your head. Therapy can support ways to develop self-compassion, self-trust, build self-esteem grounded in who you are and not what you do.

• Burnout

  A good portion of the studies done on the mental health of doctoral students is related to burnout, it’s that prevalent. It makes so much sense that doctoral students and PhD researchers who are underpaid, overworked, and stretched to the limits of their brain power creating an original contribution for science and research would be burnout. In therapy, we can work on completing your stress cycle, discerning different types of rest, playing more, and other avenues for healing and recovery (while still being in the PhD, or moving through burn out in afterwards depending on when you come to therapy).

• Isolation

  There are many reasons the PhD brings up feelings of isolation for folks. It may be the schedule of when you are collecting data or when you have motivation to write the disseration or thesis, it may be feeling like you need to work weekends and missing out on a social life, it may be that you feel misunderstood or distant from your department or committee or cohort, it may be that it’s a lonely experience to write essentially a book on work that has to come from your brain (for the original contribution bit). There are plenty of valid, reasonable, and appropriate reasons to feel isolated during the PhD due to the system and way things are set up. Therapy can not only provide a space for validation and understanding as well as processing and examination of changes that could be made, but the therapeutic relationship itself may support a reduction in feelings of isolation.

This is a non-exhaustive list of areas where therapy can support your mental health and wellbeing as a doctoral student and throughout your PhD journey.

It may be true too that while the area was talked about in this blog, you might have a completely different experience and take on it. Please don’t let that misalignment discourage you from seeking therapy because while only one potential perspective is shown here, there are many reasons to seek therapeutic support throughout the PhD (we didn’t even get into how life happens around you during the PhD in ways that can be hard to manage too!).

Since the PhD world can be mystifying to many who have not experienced it, you may find it helpful to see a therapist who has been through the academic system - someone you don’t have to explain all the particularities and ins-and-outs of the PhD journey to.

Dr. S