The Institutionalized Academic

The name of this blog refers to the mental institutions and my professional role in the academy.  We consider these two aspects of the title.

Mental Institutions
My relationship to mental institutions is surprisingly complex given that I have never been in one.  I have had relatives who have been irreparably harmed by their visits to mental institutions and their encounters with involuntary treatment.  I have also had relatives who have worked in mental institutions and their descriptions of the inhumanity of the environment are disheartening.  I believe that these institutions are insidiously harmful to both the patients and the people who work there.  I believe it is much better to treat people at home surrounded by their support system than to potentially mistreat them in an institution.

Thankfully, I have not been hospitalized.  I find that having a reliable doctor to call can be more effective and provide faster treatment than a hospital.  I fear ending up in a hospital, because of the ease with which one can become an involuntary patient and a prisoner.  I also fear ending up in a hospital, because my accustomed surroundings and familiar behaviours would not be available.  Can you imagine me carrying my laptop into a mental hospital and asking for internet access?  How else would I be able to work?

The Academic
I mentioned briefly in the welcome post that part of the purpose of this blog is to educate people about psychiatric disorders and university life.  The most important point of the blog is that there are successful academics that have these disorders and that people with these disorders are normal people.

As I progress from graduate student to post-doctoral fellow, I have gained more responsibility.  As a graduate student, I had undergraduate students come out to me as having psychiatric disorders, and I admired their bravery.  But I was not fully responsible for their progress in class, as I worked under a professor.  Now, as a post-doctoral fellow, I am responsible for mentoring several students and am responsible for teaching a class.  It is my responsibility to help look out for students who are unwell and to help provide them resources.

Through all this, I carry my own experiences with depression, anxiety, and paranoia, and I encounter the misconceptions of other people.  I routinely hear the implication that people with mental illness are dangerous or scary.  I hear from colleagues that they do not know what to do with a troubled student.  Or they tell me stories of the suicidal student that they had to deal with.  Other times, I see systems that universities have put in place to deal with these students, and I profoundly disagree with them.  Yet I feel tongue-tied, because to speak up, to come out about the challenges that I face, means my colleagues will apply their misconceptions to me in potentially damaging ways.

I hope to use this blog as a forum to discus what I cannot say to my colleagues.  I will write about these issues as they come up, and maintain the anonymity of myself and any other characters that appear here.