Who looks after the people who do the research?
Join us this autumn on a season of reading and conversation on mental health and wellbeing in research
Research is demanding work. Contracts run out before the next one is secured. The people best placed to understand your work are often the same people you're competing with for the next grant or the next post, which makes it hard to know who you can be honest with. Rejection is part of the process, from journals, from funders, from job committees, but that doesn't make the fear of failure any smaller. And because so much of research and writing happens alone, isolation can set in long before anyone notices. This autumn, we're opening up a conversation about wellbeing in academic life and sharing reading from across our publishing program.
Some of what you'll find below is personal. Some of it is scholarship on care, loneliness, disability and the culture of institutions. Together they ask a question worth asking: what does academic life do to the people in it, and how can you cope with the stress?
Live panel discussion on wellbeing in academic life
The reading
Twelve books from across our program, on care, pressure and belonging, in English and German.
Anxiety, Modern Society and the Critical Method
A critical-theory account of anxiety as a product of modern life, from political economy to technology.
Existential Philosophy and Disability
On mental illness, addiction and neurodivergence, read through lived experience.
Fired Up! A guide to transforming your team from burnout to engagement
A framework for understanding burnout at work and building teams that stay engaged.
Poetics of Disturbances
On how literature represents mental health, neurodiversity and non-normative bodies and minds.
Navigating Workplace Stress
Treats workplace stress as a problem of how institutions are built, not how individuals cope.
Mental Health in Literatur, Populär-medien und Medizin [DE]
Asks who gets to tell the story of mental health, and from which position, across literature, media and medicine.
De Gruyter Handbook of Media Psychology
Includes a chapter on digital media and mental health in its survey of how media shapes attitudes, emotions and behavior.
Die Kunst der psycho-logischen Selbstführung: Empathie, Ekpathie und positive Indifferenz [DE]
On staying empathic in an age of emotional overload, and learning to set boundaries without giving up compassion.
The Podcast
Sustainability Matters on psychiatry, voice and who gets heard
The research
Six articles on loneliness, burnout and the culture of academic life. Free to read this autumn.
Inflated Academic Egos and Therapeutic Spaces
Why academic environments reward posturing and grandiosity, and what those behaviors are often covering up.
Purify: Tanaka Shōzō’s Flows and Toxic Academia
What a 19th-century campaigner against industrial pollution can teach us about toxic academic culture.
Quiet Strategies: Gender, Agency, and Sustainable Academia in China
On silence as a survival strategy for Chinese women in academia, and the toll it takes.
Beyond “Psychic Income”: An Exploration of Interventions to Address Work-Life Imbalances, Burnout, and Precarity in Contemporary Nonprofit
Why loving your work is not enough, and what employers owe people beyond a sense of purpose.
The Blog
Three perspectives on mental health: at work, in literature, and in a notebook of your own.
Beyond Individual Suffering: Mental Health and Intersectionality in Literature
How literature shows mental health to be shaped by class, culture and power, not just individual experience.
Guest author: Dr. Marcella Fassio (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Mental Health in Literatur, Populärmedien und Medizin)
The Comeback of the Diary – and How It Boosts Your Wellbeing
Why keeping a diary is worth your time again, in an age of scrolling and overload.
Guest author: Angelika von Aufseß (Tagebuch reloaded)
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