Covid-19 has increased the strain on already overtaxed academics and students
While they may be vital to safeguarding lives, actions taken by governments to curb the spread of Covid-19 have come with major consequences.
Alongside economic woes, social distancing has left many people struggling to protect their mental as well as their physical health.
For many researchers and students, the wave of lockdowns triggered an immediate scramble to get home from abroad. Others have been forced to rush into preparing for working remotely.
As campuses shut down and travel ground to a halt, scholars around the world began trying to adjust.
But many have been left mired in confusion about their present and future circumstances, what exactly they are and are not allowed—or required—to do and how they should do it, and whether or when things might return to normal.
“Uncertainty is the first thing that takes a toll on mental health,” says Robert Napier, president of the European Students’ Union.
Those in academia have had to navigate challenges common to many professions, such as making living and home-working arrangements and ensuring the welfare of family members. But they also face other niche issues, such as mitigating lost access to resources and data, and rerouting connections with their colleagues and students.
International students have had an especially tough time.
“They have problems like ‘I’ve signed up for a lease for the next six months and still need to pay it’ or ‘What’s going to happen if I don’t get a grant?’” says Napier.
He is especially worried about vulnerable groups, such as people with disabilities and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
“Amidst the emergency it’s really easy to get lost trying to make things work, but we need to make sure they work for everybody—not just for the few,” he says. “These students require our support now more than ever.”
For early-career researchers, isolation and anxiety have joined the bread-and-butter stresses of academic life—publication output, impact factors, lack of job security and the race to get ahead.
“Getting a PhD under normal circumstances is extremely stressful,” says Andrew Timming, a professor of human resource management at the University of Western Australia. “I’m afraid that Covid-19 could end up as a breaking point for many PhD students.”
The shift to remote working has “dramatically changed the workload” for senior academics, according to Timming. He also fears that for researchers with teaching duties the sudden need to move online means “balls will likely be dropped in other areas”, such as pastoral support of PhD students.
Some senior academics have been putting in extra time to check in on students, especially those stranded far from home.
Kim de Jong, a professor at Leiden University’s Institute of Psychology, is especially worried for her international students, some of whom sought her opinion on whether to stay in dormitories or leave for their home countries.
“Ultimately I could not make that decision for them, but I would do my best to support them either way,” she says.
Students are not the only ones facing added pressures.
“Supervisors and teachers are also dealing with a lot themselves—I myself have young kids at home, one of which needs to homeschool, and my partner works shifts in an essential profession, so I have the majority of caretaking tasks,” de Jong says. “For teaching, that is a huge challenge.”
Falling through the cracks
Many researchers have found that strained job markets are an additional stressor. Reports of universities, industry and the public sector withdrawing offers and cancelling searches for candidates have multiplied, and many young academics are using social media to air concerns about ‘falling through the cracks’.
Dessie Clark, a soon-to-graduate psychology student at Michigan State University in the United States, found that once the lockdown started, her job search for both academic and non-academic positions ran into a series of closed doors.
“Now I’m hearing about rescinded offers, being notified of cancelled or failed searches, or jobs are being frozen or moving to virtual searches,” she says.
Others have struggled with the lack of in-person networking opportunities.
Claire Turner, who recently began a PhD in history at the University of Leeds in the UK, says that before the pandemic she had been active in seminars and reading groups, and had been slated to co-organise one conference and present her findings at another. This was to be her first opportunity to present her research as a PhD student, but now it is up in the air.
Turner has managed to make some “incredibly useful” connections on social media, but says the internet is no substitute for bricks-and-mortar universities.
Furthermore, she says, “I work a lot better in the library than I do at home, so working from home every day means I sometimes lose inspiration and struggle to concentrate.”
The pandemic has begun to plateau in some countries, triggering an initial easing of lockdown restrictions. But its long-term effects on academia remain unclear. They may include greater instability and poorer job prospects for researchers, with concomitant damage to mental health.
Some are now pushing universities and governments to make sure no one falls behind and to provide urgent support across society.
“Governments must find evidence-based ways to boost the resilience of our societies and find ways to treat those with mental ill health remotely to come out of this pandemic,” says Emily Holmes, author of a recent paper, published in the journal the Lancet Psychiatry, that calls for the immediate rollout of real-time mental health monitoring globally.
De Jong’s university has undertaken various initiatives to promote mental health. This includes the Caring Universities programme, a collaboration that includes several Dutch institutions helping to support students in dealing with stress. The project, which started a few months ago, offers online help and is close to launching, De Jong says.
Other universities have similar schemes. Students at Leiden University can seek help through a programme for peer support in which students meet online once a week in sessions led by a staff member and a student in an active position in university, for example. And at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, in Romania, masters students in psychology have taken on the role of student therapists, under the supervision of a practitioner.
“It’s not easy—everybody is under high stress and anxiety and trying to do their best,” says Ludovic Thilly, chair of the Coimbra group of universities and an executive vice-rector at the University of Poitiers in France. “But it’s wonderful to see that the whole community is moving so quickly to find solutions.”
How to study mental health
Researchers studying mental health have a multitude of factors to get right. A recent study in the Lancet Psychiatry gives a number of pointers.
- Include key information on study design such as sample size, sources of bias and participant characteristics.
- Go out of the way to include vulnerable groups of people in studies, and be aware of the pandemic’s potential to deepen health inequalities.
- Engage with the public and healthcare providers, and seek their input on study design.
- Share full study protocols where possible and participate in rapid peer review of protocols before data collection.
- Seek out “imaginative collaborations”, with examples in fields such as psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, virology, intensive care medicine, and respiratory medicine.
This article also appeared in Research Europe