Mental health letters

We, academic workers in Dresden, share our personal struggles with the academic work environment and mental health. The letters you can read below are personal reflections on the challenges we face in our lives within the academic world.

Want to share your experience?

Letter content

The general idea is to write a letter about your experience at the intersection of mental health and academia. This may include experiences within academia (e.g. advisors, work environment, precarity, etc…), how personal experiences in your life were not accommodated for by academia, how academia fails to address and take care of your mental health, discrimination, what you wish to change, etc…

It is your choice how personal you want to be. Be aware of the level of detail you provide in your writing, which could lead to your identification. It is your choice, and we won’t edit your text.

We also ask you not to include anyone else’s name in your letter, as we cannot publish such letters.

Letter delivery

We collect all letters online in a drop-off only storage system and then publish them on this page at our earliest convenience.

Upload your letter in that folder, preferably without meta-data (.txt file, .md file, or cleaned-up .pdf file). By doing so, you authorize us to publish your text anonymously.
The letter will be read by a member of the association before posting on the website (~1 week).

Note: We may re-use your text without any alteration for further publication (e.g. printed version).

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#40A81A

Navigating the academic landscape, I encountered a mental health challenge that underscored the profound impact of isolation and minimal collaboration. The relentless pressure of working solo, coupled with being relegated to a role that felt more akin to a menial laborer than an intellectual contributor, took a significant toll on my mental health....

#A1B2C3

Before I started my PhD I conducted a 6 month internship at a young researcher’s laboratory working in Dresden. In short, it was the worst experience of my life. Before I joined, he had told me that these 6 months would serve as a trial to prove I was ready to start a PhD at his lab, but when I solved the Visa problems and finally arrived to Germany, he told me that he had hired someone else for the same position and only planned to hire one of us....

#20E6E3

Dear professor, dear institute director, dear Minister, I am a Ph.D. student, an “early career researcher”, and I need to communicate how my working in academia affects my mental health. The most prominent issue I struggle with is precarity. I am going to graduate soon and my contract here will finish just as soon....

#C46AE5

#DA42D6

About 3 years ago I was finishing my 1st postdoc. It was in the middle of the pandemic; my contract was ending and because of family reasons I was not able to look for new career options outside of Dresden. It is because of the pressure of time and circumstances that I decided to accept a position with someone who gave me red flags already during the interview process....

#F6F7D2

Since my early youth, I have been interested in science. Passionate about biology, I knew as a teenager that I wanted to be part of the academic community, working for the improvement of human knowledge, for a better understanding of the living world. I wanted to become a researcher....

#25F1EC

Being a postdoc faced me to experiences challenging with my mental health. The postdoc status places you in a temporary position where you feel a lot of pressure and see that this career step is very crucial. It is for a limited period of time and you need to show that you can be “productive”, meaning producing “interesting results”, publish papers and these are not always proportional to the work you have done....

#BB77D3

Journey of a postdoc When I started my PhD, the workload was big but everything was so mind-blowing. It was amazing to be part of a research team. But soon it became obvious the place was not such a haven. PhD students crying between or during meetings, postdocs obsessed with their contract finishing too soon and not having finished their project....

#DFEAE9

To whom it may concern, As a Ph.D. student, one of the primary challenges I faced was the lack of communication and guidance from my supervisor. Throughout my entire project, meaningful discussions about our work were rare, leaving me feeling unsupported and isolated. Despite reaching out numerous times, opportunities for collaboration and guidance were limited....

#E47AD4

The academic code of silence has to be broken at some point. Although it won’t benefit me personally, with this open letter I hope to raise awareness on the problems that I have experienced so far, and that many of my friends in research experienced at some point. I will here focus on two main issues: temporary employment and workplace, as the impossibility of seeking a long-term life routine, and the “once a student, always a student” view in Academia, as the inability to recognize workers’ value....

#E61BE7

I am an interdisciplinary scientist in the topics A and B, and obtained my degree in a non-European institution. In there we don’t have a distinction between bachelor and master’s degree. We have a 6 years long career which is considered a combination of the two, and allows you to apply for a PhD immediately after....

#3689A7

I don’t know if I’m going to make it. I don’t know if I will go on to become a person of power in academia. And as you get older in the academic system, you’re either a person wielding quite some power over others and in the system, or you’re simply not in the system....

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