science.sciencemag.org/content/367/64…
An interesting article on a faculty member who suddenly discovered he had epilepsy while beginning his faculty career. The "Working Life" column has a number of articles about disability and chronic illness, including many on mental health in academia.
An interesting article on a faculty member who suddenly discovered he had epilepsy while beginning his faculty career. The "Working Life" column has a number of articles about disability and chronic illness, including many on mental health in academia.
One thing that I've personally observed and heard from other folks is that the support and accommodation systems break down as one progresses in academia. Grad students get less support (and more confusion!) than undergrads (who already don't get enough)...
... when you move on to a postdoc, you get handed over to occupational health instead of student services (or sometimes this happens concurrently in grad school), and when you get to faculty level the support is essentially absent other than the official (legally mandated) type.
I've been lucky that the support in my current postdoc from occupational health has been really good, but even the idea that faculty and postdocs need support just like students seems completely foreign to many institutions.
Plus the leaky pipeline (which is even worse for chronic illness and disability than for some other also-underrepresented minorities) causes the loss of representation, mentoring, etc for senior academics with chronic illness/disabilities. So many leave.
It's perhaps telling that our first ever disabled/chronically ill (allies welcome!) social event at the Evolution 2019 conference had one. one. faculty member attendee, while the other 20 or so folks were about 75% grad students and 25% postdocs.
Faculty, you have disabled and chronically ill folks in your labs, I guarantee. Even if you aren't yourself affected, why not support us?
Even if these numbers don't reflect the leaky pipeline (n=1! etc.), the lack of faculty representation at that social was disheartening.
Even if these numbers don't reflect the leaky pipeline (n=1! etc.), the lack of faculty representation at that social was disheartening.
It told me (the organizer) one of three things:
(1) Either you don't think you have disabled students
(2) You don't care about supporting them
or (3) There aren't many/any disabled faculty
(1) Either you don't think you have disabled students
(2) You don't care about supporting them
or (3) There aren't many/any disabled faculty
(obviously many of these assumptions aren't true, there are great folks out there and I have met disabled faculty across disciplines. but still, disheartening)
Part of the problem IMO is that we treat disability, especially in the US, as a legal matter rather than one of diversity.
We (hopefully) celebrate inclusion of racial/ethnic minorities, women, queer folks, first generation folks, but rarely folks with disabilities.
We (hopefully) celebrate inclusion of racial/ethnic minorities, women, queer folks, first generation folks, but rarely folks with disabilities.
There are legal reasons for this, but it creates this firewall where many diversity initiatives don't even treat disability/chronic illness as diversity, even though we are the largest minority group (in the US at least).
My PhD institution had a staffed office and graduate fellowships for racial/ethnic minority students (which is great!) but we had to fight for several years to get a disability/Deaf cultural center for students to have a space to learn, collaborate, and celebrate their success.
