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A mental health crisis in science

nature.com

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Re: A mental health crisis in science

#81

Post by jamesash »

BeetleB wrote: post #70
jamesash wrote: post #66

An early stage lab has a lot in common with a startup. The PI is given seed money to validate an ambitious idea and has limited time and resources to do it. The work is extremely labor intensive and in the early stages the PI will be in the trenches with the early employees working in the lab and setting an example for them to follow. Fast failure and pivots are extremely common. Furthermore, at any time the research…

> An early stage lab has a lot in common with a startup. The problem is you also see this behavior in well established lab, where the PI has very little to lose if he quits research altogether. In my experience, the correlation with whether the professor was an assistant professor seeking tenure vs a well established full professor and the amount of work they make PhD students do is almost nil. It's mostly purely dri…

It's pick your poison, like choosing a startup vs BigCorp. My observations pertain to organic chemistry specifically, I'm less familiar with other fields.

With an assistant prof you will be asked to do unreasonably long hours on ideas that haven't been fully validated, but you get a lot of face-time with the PI (for better or worse) and have a chance to get on the ground floor of a potentially great research program. Your boss has a lot more invested in your success because their career depends more on you. It can be exciting.

With a more established prof you are more likely be plugged into the n-th iteration of an established research program. You're more expendable because the prof has more options to hire your replacement; you can get lost in the crowd; the prof won't be in the lab as much (travel, service responsibilities) so it's more sink or swim. Lots can go wrong in this environment. As the group gets larger, internal politics can create frictions, especially if the supervisor is away a lot.

I see A) as better than B) but that is just me.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#82

Post by greenhearth »

abhayhegde wrote: post #42

Academia places unrealistic goals on brilliant people and pays them so meagerly that they have to often find other sources of income. On top of this, some of the advisors are outright unbearable with their demands and work expectations, the world seems bleak for even a motivated researcher. Amidst the scarcity of grants, measly pay, extremely competitive environment, uncertainties tied with job market, failures in ex…

Can the institutions be blamed for trying to stay afloat? Where is this money coming from to pay the scientists? A collective decision has to be made to keep science healthy in a meaningful and productive way. I think academia (through its ethos of critical approach and peer review) may be the single social structure that keeps some kind of sanity.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#83

Post by pelasaco »

trabant00 wrote: post #54
tptacek wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do with the article.

The article states multiple times that harassment, bullying, abuse and general toxicity is affecting science workers in general, but in particular women and minorities. My post states that said abuses are historically at a low point, especially for those groups, thus can not explain the rise in mental health issues. How exactly does this have "nothing to do with the article"?

Your comment has everything to do with the article, but unfortunately, the "it has nothing to do with the article" is one of the issues with Science. To keep my argumentation on topic: Historically, scientists never had a so safe life like today. In the past, scientists used to put their life at stake. Galileo, Copernicus, Turin, Einstein..

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#84

Post by dv_dt »

tptacek wrote: post #78
ProjectArcturis wrote: post #62

Fundamentally, the research industry requires continuous exponential growth to accommodate everyone working there. Each PI trains 10+ grad students in their career. Where do those students go? They all want to become PIs themselves. Otherwise why would they get a PhD? Ultimately the majority must be disappointed and leave for positions outside academia. But leaving academia is a process that takes some time. First co…

In biochem, the norm is for people who intend to work seriously in the industry to go to grad school; that is, academic research in that field is not a competition for a tiny number of academic jobs. But bio and chem have two of the worst reputations for academic research culture.

I wonder if there is a filtering effect here where people who have relatively better soft skills and technical knowledge move into industry, and what we are seeing in academic circles is biased to what the industry declined.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#85

Post by pelasaco »

xbar wrote: post #73

Science is hard, viciously competitive, and deeply cruel in all ways in order for some to win. Cheating, plagiarism, racism, sexual harassment, theft of ideas, publishing spam, .... Everything is in play in this game. Calling it "culture" and laying some "blame" is a convenient "we're the worst off subset of victims; it's not us, it's them" perspective but it will neither solve the problem nor address the actual cond…

yay more laws!

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#86

Post by tptacek »

pelasaco wrote: post #83
trabant00 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article states multiple times that harassment, bullying, abuse and general toxicity is affecting science workers in general, but in particular women and minorities. My post states that said abuses are historically at a low point, especially for those groups, thus can not explain the rise in mental health issues. How exactly does this have "nothing to do with the article"?

Your comment has everything to do with the article, but unfortunately, the "it has nothing to do with the article" is one of the issues with Science. To keep my argumentation on topic: Historically, scientists never had a so safe life like today. In the past, scientists used to put their life at stake. Galileo, Copernicus, Turin, Einstein..

Yes, yes, one of the great challenges of modern science is that we're not murdering the scientists anymore.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#87

Post by xhkkffbf »

currymj wrote: post #52
dbcooper wrote: post #33

A part of this is that in academia there are often few positive career rewards. You're under pressure to publish frequently, in high impact factor journals, and that is to keep your job. You don't get pay rises or bonuses, or any other career improvements, and job security can be until your next contract, at best. If you don't make it to tenured professor, and have good grant funding, then you are staring down the ba…

This would help on some level, although it would definitely make the stress on applicants much higher. E.g. there’s increasingly an expectation that students should come into a PhD program with one or more publications already under their belt. For top programs ideally these should be first author (not yet an absolute requirement but it’s more important each year). So you better get a good research assistant job as a…

Would you rather be told you're not going to get a stable job as a researcher when you're 21 and first applying to grad school or at 28-35 when you're finally told you didn't get any interviews for a tenure track job?

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#88

Post by tptacek »

greenhearth wrote: post #82
abhayhegde wrote: post #42

Academia places unrealistic goals on brilliant people and pays them so meagerly that they have to often find other sources of income. On top of this, some of the advisors are outright unbearable with their demands and work expectations, the world seems bleak for even a motivated researcher. Amidst the scarcity of grants, measly pay, extremely competitive environment, uncertainties tied with job market, failures in ex…

Can the institutions be blamed for trying to stay afloat? Where is this money coming from to pay the scientists? A collective decision has to be made to keep science healthy in a meaningful and productive way. I think academia (through its ethos of critical approach and peer review) may be the single social structure that keeps some kind of sanity.

Academic research is funded by grants.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#89

Post by spamizbad »

abhayhegde wrote: post #42

Academia places unrealistic goals on brilliant people and pays them so meagerly that they have to often find other sources of income. On top of this, some of the advisors are outright unbearable with their demands and work expectations, the world seems bleak for even a motivated researcher. Amidst the scarcity of grants, measly pay, extremely competitive environment, uncertainties tied with job market, failures in ex…

Part of what contributes to this is the "brainwashing" that takes place in PhD programs that discourages applicants from transitioning out of academia into "the industry". Academia has tons of extremely smart, hard-working individuals, most of whom would have excellent white collar careers with half the work and 2-10x the pay.

There are a handful of academics who are truly built for working in academia and wouldn't be as successful in "the industry" but at least half could transition out of academia and clean-up with a normal office job.

Re: A mental health crisis in science

#90

Post by jamesash »

tptacek wrote: post #72
jamesash wrote: post #66

An early stage lab has a lot in common with a startup. The PI is given seed money to validate an ambitious idea and has limited time and resources to do it. The work is extremely labor intensive and in the early stages the PI will be in the trenches with the early employees working in the lab and setting an example for them to follow. Fast failure and pivots are extremely common. Furthermore, at any time the research…

This is the understandable part of researcher and grad student abuse and the sense I get talking to people is that they do indeed enter the field expecting to duck in on weekends to tend to experiments, and expecting not to be well compensated. The part that doesn't fit is their PIs being continuously abusive, or, worse, destructive: the PI's goals are ostensibly those of a supposed startup founder, to drive a team t…

Two most extreme stories I am most familiar with (did not experience first-hand) were of a PI throwing a chair in the direction of a postdoc, and of a PI having a screaming fit directly in the face of a graduate student. Both assistant profs.

One got tenure and became more mellow in a relative sense. The other was subsequently unable to attract any more graduate students to their lab, and left for another, slightly less prestigious institution.

I am also familiar with one case of graduate students resigning en masse, leaving a PI with a hollowed-out research group of 2-3 that they had to rebuild. Prof had a subsequent attitude adjustment.

In all these cases the stories spread pretty quickly and profs realized that there were costs to abusive behavior. These stories pre-date social media BTW.

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