Mental health in the academic Twittersphere – An analysis of conversations in the French and UK academic communities

The prevalence of mental health issues amongst researchers is well documented by the literature. 38% of researchers are at risk of mental health disorders, which is double the average population. This gets worse when looking at doctoral researchers, also called PhD candidates or PhD students, with 50% experiencing psychological distress (Levecque et al., 2017).

Notwithstanding the significance of such papers to bring mental health to the agenda, they also suffer from some limitations: they offer a snapshot picture in a given country while the situation can differ across cultural and economic contexts. For instance, they do not allow seeing how the prevalence of the issue may have changed over the years, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. They are also not very vocal about the causes of this distress. Some studies link it to individual characteristics such has whether or not the researcher is international (Mattijssen et al., 2020), has to provide informal care (Bergmans and Van der Weijden, 2020) as well as motivation, writing skills, academic identity, self-worth and self-efficacy (Sverdlik et al., 2018). Studies stemming from groups of doctoral researchers themselves show that some other factors play a role: the type of contracts doctoral students have, the clarity of the rules in their institution, and the regularity of supervision meetings (PhD net, 2019).

Yet, there is not much research identifying good practices. For instance, Kusurkar (2020) mentions the role of affiliation with colleagues and focusing on achievements and intrinsic motivation, which is hardly actionable. Help may be offered at several levels, but not always easily accessible or fitting needs.