The first time I met my new Head of School at my first job post-PhD, I cried at her for half an hour. I had just moved from the US to the UK a month after defending my PhD thesis. This should have been a celebratory and exciting time, albeit a chaotic one. Yet I was realising rapidly that my PhD, which had prepared me for a research career, had taught me very little about the other two-thirds of my job. I was thousands of pounds in debt, thanks to the financial cost of staying in academia and years of underpayment as a PhD student. And, like many early-career researchers (ECRs), I was managing depression and anxiety, two illnesses I had since adolescence. There was nothing left to do but break down.
Rates of anxiety and depression among ECRs are startlingly high. In a 2018–19 survey of over 3,000 UK PhD students, 71 per cent reported experiencing symptoms of at least mild depression. A similar amount, 74 per cent, reported experiencing symptoms of anxiety.
