Thread by @drspacejunk

In two minds whether to tweet about this but I've got a looong bus journey ahead of me. I've been thinking about the contemporary academic workplace, and my experience of it in relation to other workplaces. This will involve some autobiograhical reflections.

Before and after my PhD, I was a professional heritage consultant, working with and for a whole range of clients and companies. After my PhD, I didn't have a straight academic path. I took on a big cultural heritage project because I was tired of being poor.

This was a rather horrible job. In the course of it I was subjected to a lot of verbal abuse from both sides. I was physically threatened and once attended a meeting I didn't think I was going to leave alive. I've never been so frightened in all my life.

To cope with the stress, I started smoking. It was the only way I could get through each day. My blood pressure started to rise. I came close to walking out a couple of times, but other factors kept me there until the end of the project.

After that I worked in a government agency for a while with lovely people. My blood pressure went back to regular and I stopped smoking. Then I had a revelation about space archaeology and started working towards getting back into academia.

This started out as casual teaching and short term contracts. I was working ALL the time to prepare new subjects and keep up with the regular teaching, while living in poverty. Work took up everything. I felt cut off from family and friends.

Formerly, I had always been engaged in community projects. Now there was no time or head space for this. I realised that this was the real ivory tower. I started smoking again. My blood pressure went up to alarming levels.

One day, I realised I was MORE stressed than when I was being threatened and barricaded myself in my house at night for six weeks because I was afraid they would come.

Then I became clinically depressed, which was a bit of a shock for me as I'd never experienced it before. Even more isolation. Every time someone asked me how I was, I was on the verge of saying 'I'm not ok'. But I didn't.

One day, I fell to the bottom of the pit. I realised I needed help. It took a superhuman effort, but I called the university staff counsellors, thinking to get an appointment. And do you know what happened? This counsellor had a call service! They said they'd take a message!

The counsellor would call me back in the next day to make the appt, they said! I was absolutely fucking devastated. It took everything I had to make that telephone call and I still had no help.

So I struggled on. One day I had a supervision meeting with one of my honours students who revealed she was also struggling. She talked of how good one of the campus doctors had been. I resolved to see him myself.

This turned out to be the best move ever - he's still my doctor and now friend. Together we sorted it out and I started to feel better. So all good there.

One day much later I confided this whole episode of my life to a very wise astronomer as we were driving together to visit a telescope. He asked me if I had had a straight-through academic path. I explained my career. Ah, he said, that all makes sense.

I was all ears! Well, he said, as a professional, you were used to being treated with respect. You were an equal negotiating with other equals, no matter the size of the company.

What you experienced at university, explained this wise and lovely astronomer, was the absence of respect. This is a common experience and contributes to depression. (I think he said there were studies about this).

He was right. It wasn't overt, of course, and it wasn't my colleagues' behaviour towards me - there was no respect in this work environment. I hadn't realised I took it for granted in my former life until it wasn't there.

I should add this was all over a decade ago! And I don't want you to think it was all doom and gloom all the time. I'm talking about some specific instances to illustrate a point.

In 2012-2014 I took two years off because a local consulting company wanted me to work with them. It was initially great! I got weekends back. I remembered what a regular working life was like. Projects could be finished instead of never being enough.

Unbeknownst to me, though, this company had some BIG problems. One of them was a culture of workplace bullying that was driven from the top. Of course it's hard to see when you're in it.

You think it's just you at first. I'd sit in these team meetings and just keep my head down. Once the boss said stuff I knew was incorrect but I was too afraid to make myself a target and I said nothing. Later other staff said they all felt this way too - it wasn't just me.

Things were building up, I could feel it. I sustained a major injury and they encouraged me to rest at home, even though I was fit for work. When I came back some of my projects had been assigned to other people without any input from me.

I was lead on a prestigious project and I wanted to do it justice. I was told to deliver the stage 1 report to the client on time but I wasn't allowed to put the project code in the timesheet. If any other staff helped me, they were in trouble.

Don't ask me how I did it but I did! I delivered the report and the client was delighted with it and put this in writing. I circulated it with thanks to all staff who helped. Crickets from the bosses....

Thanks to everyone expressing sympathy and kind thoughts! It's appreciated but it's all old stuff now. Does feel kind of weird writing it in one place though.

Performance review time! They hammered me. I had to sign off on the report and I didn't think it was fair - didn't reflect any of the good work I'd done. I asked for it to be amended and they refused.

I was in a terrible place. Did I believe this performance review or not? People who've experienced this type of workplace bullying will surely recognise my feelings at this point.

Break from this thread - about to arrive at a party!

To continue. This constituted one on the worst moments of my life. The performance review basically said I was no good at profession I had chosen and worked in since I was in my early 20s.

I thought to myself that I just had to face facts. There was no point trying to gloss it over. I had been deluding myself my whole life into thinking I was good at heritage consulting. I was wrong.

This mood rather unfortunately coincided with a day of travel to reach my folks' place in the country, for the celebration of their 50th wedding anniversary. I was by myself on planes and buses for hours.

In those hours I was in extreme mental anguish. I was trying to force myself to accept that I had wasted my life in pursuing a career I was not suited for. I also knew I would h ave to conceal my distress from my perceptive mother.

When I finally arrived at the house, most other family members were assembled. My sister took one look at me and dragged me outside away from everyone. 'What's wrong?', she asked. 'I've never seen you like this before'.

Somehow I got through the weekend without my mother noticing, and with lots of support from my sister. After it I went back to work, and a few weekends later gave a TEDxSydney talk at the Sydney Opera House.

My bosses chose the Monday after the TEDx talk to call me in for a meeting which I knew was to sack me. There was a day's notice, and no opportunity to request an advocate to accompany me. I think this stuff is illegal...

Anyway I was very tired and not in the mood! I requested the meeting later in week which I knew they couldn't refuse. Of course it happened. It was kind of a relief. You can imagine I haven't told you here the half of what went on.

Pretty soon I was (if I may say) snapped up by another company. But I had only really just started to process what had happened. Over weeks and months, I started to see the patterns that were not obvious to me while I was there.

I started to look at the literature on workplace bullying. I realised that my dark hours on the bus to Berrigan trying to come to terms with the destruction of my sense of self was a common experience. I remembered people talking about the

Devastating effects and the long term impacts. Now it all made sense. AND here is the point that I started this whole thread to get to! The more I read about workplace bullying, the more it sounded like academia.

Try these for size: constantly moving arbitrary goal posts, which you are are penalised and blamed for failing to anticipate and adapt to.

Or the perennial favourite: required to meet an arbitrarily imposed target, while having the resources you need to meet it removed.

Or this: being made to feel like you are inadequate, that you've never worked hard enough, published enough, got enough grants.

My point is that imposter syndrome is SYSTEMIC and this is a feature, not a bug, of the system. The entire system has the same characteristics as workplace bullying.

How do we change this culture? I don't know and I wish I did.