Mental Health Letter
Academia, the ivory tower, the palace of distanced, objective rationality has and to this day remains a milieu for the financially secure, dependent-free, and socially well off. There is an underlying assumption that an academic, be it grad student or postdoc, is passionate, motivated, physically healthy, non-precarious, and dependent-free.
In academia it is common knowledge that we are overworked and underpaid. It is also common knowledge that academia is a risk. There simply aren’t enough professorships for each postdoc, and a substantial fraction (~1/3) of PhD students don’t finish. Not to mention those who have to take a leave of unpaid absence. Despite all our claims about accessibility and diversity this working environment caters to a specific type of student: one without dependents, who has a family that can support them if things go wrong, who is medically independent, and who is more or less free of the precarities of life under capitalism.
When you don’t fit into this bin, your ability to rationally and objectively engage in science is diminished. A PhD isn’t just something you do to advance scientific understanding, or prove your merit as an investigator. It is a job. It is the thing you do for 8 (or many more) hours a day to pay your bills. To send money to your mom who doesn’t have a place to live. To keep yourself housed because there is no one to catch you if you fall. This changes the way you see science, make decisions, and engage in academia. When experiments stop working, there isn’t just a sense of being a failure as a scientist, there is a real sense of fear that you’ll have to exit and find a job. And one that pays well (because let’s be honest, part of the reason you enrolled in a PhD was to eventually find a higher paying job, which you put off getting for your 5-6 years of underpayment).
For me this was academia. It started in undergrad. Parents went through a messy divorce. Dad started drinking practically every night, and mom got into some pay day loans trying to find a place to live that wasn’t with him. What was the result? I couldn’t expect to rely on my dad to support me. He filed for bankruptcy and couldn’t cosign a student loan. So I couldn’t expect to finish school. And for mom, well after losing her life of 22 years and with loan sharks harassing her every day, she eventually told me she planned to kill herself. So I couldn’t expect to rely on her either. But I also couldn’t not help her. I worked 1-2 jobs during undergrad to help keep my mom afloat, and I let my dad use the remaining money from previous student loans to pay the mortgage on his house. Otherwise he wouldn’t have a place to live either. Or me. This started in my 3rd year of undergrad. Which is typically 4 years in the US. It continued during my fourth year. At the start of which I learned you can get paid to go to grad school. And from my perspective at the time, paid quite well. Paid more than my mom. Plus, you would get a powerful degree at the end that I believed would free me and hopefully my family from this predicament.
And so I went to grad school. At a quite prestigious school: Cornell. Ranked top 10 in my field: mechanical engineering. Ivy league. And yeah, things were better. I had a steady salary, making more than I did part time in undergrad. I sent money back to my mom every now and then when she was struggling to make rent. And what I learned was, we don’t talk about these problems in academia. There is help for people with physical disabilities. And, we talk about mental health counseling and awareness etc etc etc. And it’s great that we have and do these things. Even though they usually fall short of what is needed. But we don’t talk about money problems. You’re paid a stipend, which is enough to cover rent (though not if you’re in Boston or California) and buy enough groceries to keep you alive. But if you have debt, student loans, or people relying on you, it won’t be enough to go around. And that’s not even mentioning living a life. You simply exist to churn out researcher for an institution.
And while you find people who have the same struggle you do, you feel isolated. Science quickly loses its purity. It’s a thing you do for survival. You accept the sunk cost fallacy. You will put up with this low wage for 5-7 years so that at the end you can get out and have stability.
But how are you supposed to talk about this with your advisor? You can’t really ask for a raise. And they can’t even give you one. And they’re not your therapist either. When you tell them your struggles they usually don’t really understand. They might sympathize and look at you like you’re some poor kid and feel bad for you. But they can’t really do anything and they don’t really get it because they didn’t live it. They don’t make decisions the same way you do. They don’t see the same world you do. They didn’t hit the same walls you did. They tell you to do what you’re passionate about. Pursue your dreams. Or whatever other bullshit life advice someone who’s never really struggled with money will tell you.
And this is money problems. Money problems can only be solved with money. They can’t be solved by walks in nature, breathing exercises, or meditation rooms. Only Money. And they have a habit of popping back up.
When covid hit both my parents lost their jobs. Things got rough. Mom needed money again. It was March of 2021. I knew my last paycheck would be July 2021. The vaccine wasn’t out. Covid benefits were set to end soon. The reality of being homeless and jobless concretized. So, what do you do? You look for a job. Any job. You don’t wait for your passion to show up at your door. And remember, you’re doing this while you’re both writing your thesis and collecting data from your last sets of experiments. Oh, and you’re starting to figure out you’re trans, but we’ll get to that in a few paragraphs.
And so you send out a bunch of job applications. Industry. Postdoc. Doesn’t matter, as long as it pays. And when you get one, what do you do? You take it. You take it so you can breathe a sigh of relief. A sigh of relief that you’ll have an income and can focus on finishing your thesis now. And things get better elsewhere too: the vaccine rolled out, jobs started coming back, and your parents found employment, and your dad is helping with the student loans you shared.
So I started over. New postdoc, new country, new type of science: basic science. Should be completely different from the applied science of an engineering school. I was hopeful. I went in with an open mind, trying to start fresh, and stay positive. But immediately it’s the same.
I get to Germany. I start at a prestigious Max Planck institute. I start in an empty lab that only has a few tables and chairs. I have to find the only cleanroom in the city where I can make my devices. And guess what, the Belarusian Head of the facility is being let go (the polite way they fire you in Europe, I’ve now learned) because of the (perpetual) ‘Economic Crisis.’ So it’s just me and a master’s student, who will now head the facility, left to figure out how everything works. And we do, and the science progresses, I gain experience, and it’s all good and well, but it also slows you down in your “academic progress meter.” But for me, that was all okay. I knew I didn’t want to be a professor. I just wanted to do work that paid decently, was somewhat stimulating, and felt like I was doing something slightly useful.
But now I’m transitioning too. And I have to deal with a healthcare system that doesn’t really take me seriously, and almost got me killed. But, I still completely rely on it to stay alive.
When I got to Germany, the first thing I did was get a gym membership. The second was try and find a gender therapist. It’s been over 2 years and I’m still on the waitlist. I don’t really need one to talk to or anything, I have friends and the trans community for that. But I do need one to prove to the German Medical Industrial Complex that insurance should pay for my medicine etc.
And so I know this all seems needlessly personal, and I need to relate it to academia. And that’s the point I’m going to try and make: being different, ie: not being a healthy straight white cis male with a financially stable family and no dependents makes academia not work for you. And being trans certainly makes you not that. But, to demonstrate why this is true, I need to give my personal examples (stories).
So, as I said earlier, I started to realize I’m trans in March 2021. I got a diagnosis from a gender psychologist in the US ‘certifying’ I am trans, according to some international clinical diagnosis code. I also got a prescription for estrogen lasting 4 months, so I would have time to find a doctor once I got to Germany. And so, in January 2021, after getting a Haus Arzt and freezing my sperm, I started medically transitioning with estrogen.
And so things were okay. But, the way the health care system works in Germany is you have a Haus Arzt. And you more or less rely on them to get you appointments with specialists (or so I have found). And my Haus Arzt has very strong opinions about doing things ‘properly.’ In her mind at least. And so, she made me wait to see a specialist. And so, my supply of hormones ran out. And she could have prescribed me more, but again “proper way of doing things.” So I stopped taking hormones. Against my will. I was, what we would call “forced to medically detransition.”
This is really bad for trans people. Stopping hormones abruptly is bad. It has a lot of negative side-effects, such as depression. Forced detransition is also bad, it has negative effects such as massively increased suicide rates. While I was going through this process, I found a study that forcing trans people to stop transitioning and get off hormones leads to a suicide rate of 60% (plus or minus some standard deviation, of course). Meanwhile, the rate for the general population is 1%. I don’t know exactly how they define rate. I presume it is some number of suicides over some period of time. But I didn’t really have it in me to read the materials and methods section. But what I can tell you is it was by and far the most terrifying experience of my life. I did a 6-year PhD at Cornell. A school notoriously bad for mental health, depression, and a high suicide rate of its students. But, nothing else in my life has ever come even remotely close to how horrible this experience was. (And remember, I’m still getting up and going to the lab every day for 8 hours, trying to engage in passionate scientific discussion with my peers).
So I stayed de-transitioned for awhile. I realized just how hard it would be to live your life being openly trans and to transition. And I had family coming to visit soon. Which is another way LGBT people don’t have stability, especially trans people. I wasn’t out to any of them. They’re Trump supporters from middle America. I needed to be completely stable on my own before I could come out to them. Because the hard fact is, you never know if you’ll be disowned or not. And this is just more precarity in a different form: you don’t know if you can rely on your family or not. And yeah that’s really hard to say, because you love them and have been through so much, but it’s just the way it works, but to skip the drama, I’ll say it here: I am out to both of my parents and they are super supportive and we are closer than ever.
So I know I need to relate this to academia. And I’m getting there. But, in summary: being trans is hard. It makes you hit a lot of walls that cis people simply don’t have. And this isn’t even to mention the psychological mindfuck that is dysphoria. Simply walls created by a society that isn’t ready to deal with you. And you still have all the other problems life throws at everyone.
I started transitioning again in February of 2023. This time with some testosterone blockers that made things go more smoothly. I came out to my research lab, and everyone was super supportive, which I expected, my boss told me he was there for me and supportive, etc etc. I mean, it’s been about 6 months and he still hasn’t gendered me correctly once, but he definitely doesn’t see me as lesser or anything in any way. But, here’s the thing: it’s academia, it’s precarious, you have short-term contracts. Contracts that are a job, that pay your rent, that get you health insurance so that you can see a doctor and keeping getting your hormones, and that let you continue to stay in the country. And, as I just explained, stopping hormones is bad, so you want that contract to be renewed.
So, fast forward to early Summer 2023. My contract ends in August 2023. My residence permit ends then too. If I don’t get my contract renewed, it would be difficult (if even possible?) to renew my residence permit. This means no healthcare, and having to go back to the US where I have family who (at the time) I don’t know if they will disown me or not. And I only have enough HRT to make it to early September.
So I ask my advisor if he can renew my contract. And he says something along the lines of “yes that should be possible.” And I think (to myself of course) “oh great, I don’t have to worry about the horrors of forced de-transition again.” But I never get anything in writing. And this goes back and forth a few times. Still nothing in writing.
I’m set to give lab meeting soon again too. A major update on my research progress. I’m not stupid (just an academic) so I realize he (my boss) wants to wait until I give this presentation before he renews my contract. Which is exactly what happened. Right after my talk we went into his office and signed a new 2-year contract. I had completely seen it coming.
But how do you think preparation for that talk went? Do you think I was excited to share my new findings and passions with my colleagues? To get great suggestions and tips on how to improve my presentation skills? To enthusiastically respond to insightful research suggestions? No. Of course not. I was scared shitless. I hate that I feel like I’m being dramatic and over-stating here, but I was genuinely scared that I would be forced back into a position where I could die. End of the story. That could’ve easily been it. No family to take you in. Moving back across the Atlantic with no income, and only friends to couch surf with, while desperately trying to find access to hormones before your supply runs out and you might end up killing yourself. I know that sounds dramatic, but that’s the reality. That was the prep behind my talk. Survival, not science.
And so, I think that sums up the trans experience in academia. Your life simply has way more precarity added to it than a cis person’s. Of course cis people experience the precarity in a different form and many have shared the same struggle I have with contract renewal. But that’s it. There’s no pure science. There’s no passion. Just a job that enables you to survive and exist. Because academia doesn’t accommodate you. It only accommodates people who are comfortable in life. And even then, it’s still quite harsh on them.
And so to summarize, you start science with this belief that you’ll do something exciting. That you’ll make a difference. Contribute to something. Help people. Make the world a better place. We all used to believe at least some of that bullshit. But it becomes so fake. Impossible to stomach. You get good grades, you go to top institutes, you do good science and yet you have nothing. You’ve been beaten up over and over again. You don’t see science fixing any of these issues. Only exploiting people.
Oh, and I totally never got to the part where the cryogenics company thawed my sperm and threw them away because I didn’t realize there was a monthly fee for storing them when I read the contract in German. And the fee was simply impossible for me to pay, partially because the federal reserve raised interest rates and I could barely make the payments on my student loans (even with some help from my dad) and partially because we are chronically underpaid in academia. And I know you’re probably thinking I was over-living my means, but no I wasn’t and I don’t have space to argue that, I wouldn’t be able to prove it if you’re the person thinking that. All of this would have been paid for by health insurance if I could have gotten into to see a gender therapist to ‘prove’ I am trans. But I didn’t. So I now I will never be able to have kids. So it is just another problem that science could solve, but doesn’t actually solve. And you have to sit there and have your life-dreams taken from you and pretend you’re passionate, while science does nothing.
And this is the message I am trying to convey. If you’re not part of the in-group, academia spits you out. And to you it just starts to look fake. You see and experience all these problems that science could solve, but doesn’t. You’re told to be passionate and follow your dreams. You’re told scientists are the good-guys. That they’re saving the world. That we should trust them. But after you go through this, how can you? They didn’t help you, and you see how they fail to help anyone. All you can see science as is a bunch of rich kids playing with pipets. And you don’t want to see it that way. You have friends who are scientists, who you know struggle too. But still, this is all you can see it as. And you can’t really blame yourself for seeing it that way, because that’s what it was for you.
Lastly, I want to end this on a positive note. Because I do think science could help a lot of these problems and help people like me and people who I saw suffer. But the way to do this isn’t hiring more socially-conscious professors. There’s no professor who is so socially conscious that I can go up to them and say “Hey, if you don’t renew my contract, you’re putting me in a spot where I might die.” Also, I shouldn’t have to spill all my personal problems to my boss and give them that power over me. No, the way to fix this is by creating a people’s science. One that is democratic, community oriented, stable, and focused on creating an environment worth being a part of, not a precarious competition for survival.