mental health

The case against phys ed

pnrj education, ethics, personal , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 4 JDN 2459918

If I want to stop someone from engaging in an activity, what should I do? I could tell them it’s wrong, and if they believe me, that would work. But what if they don’t believe me? Or I could punish them for doing it, and as long as I can continue to do that reliably, that should deter them from doing it. But what happens after I remove the punishment?

If I really want to make someone not do something, the best way to accomplish that is to make them not want to do it. Make them dread doing it. Make them hate the very thought of it. And to accomplish that, a very efficient method would be to first force them to do it, but make that experience as miserable and humiliating is possible. Give them a wide variety of painful or outright traumatic experiences that are directly connected with the undesired activity, to carry with them for the rest of their life.

This is precisely what physical education does, with regard to exercise. Phys ed is basically optimized to make people hate exercise.

Oh, sure, some students enjoy phys ed. These are the students who are already athletic and fit, who already engage in regular exercise and enjoy doing so. They may enjoy phys ed, may even benefit a little from it—but they didn’t really need it in the first place.

The kids who need more physical activity are the kids who are obese, or have asthma, or suffer from various other disabilities that make exercising difficult and painful for them. And what does phys ed do to those kids? It makes them compete in front of their peers at various athletic tasks at which they will inevitably fail and be humiliated.

Even the kids who are otherwise healthy but just don’t get enough exercise will go into phys ed class at a disadvantage, and instead of being carefully trained to improve their skills and physical condition at their own level, they will be publicly shamed by their peers for their inferior performance.

I know this, because I was one of those kids. I have exercise-induced bronchoconstriction, a lung condition similar to asthma (actually there’s some debate as to whether it should be considered a form of asthma), in which intense aerobic exercise causes the airways of my lungs to become constricted and inflamed, making me unable to get enough air to continue.

It’s really quite remarkable I wasn’t diagnosed with this as a child; I actually once collapsed while running in gym class, and all they thought to do at the time was give me water and let me rest for the remainder of the class. Nobody thought to call the nurse. I was never put on a beta agonist or an inhaler. (In fact at one point I was put on a beta blocker for my migraines; I now understand why I felt so fatigued when taking it—it was literally the opposite of the drug my lungs needed.)

Actually it’s been a few years since I had an attack. This is of course partly due to me generally avoiding intense aerobic exercise; but even when I do get intense exercise, I rarely seem to get bronchoconstriction attacks. My working hypothesis is that the norepinephrine reuptake inhibition of my antidepressant acts like a beta agonist; both drugs mimic norepinephrine.

But as a child, I got such attacks quite frequently; and even when I didn’t, my overall athletic performance was always worse than most of the other kids. They knew it, I knew it, and while only a few actively tried to bully me for it, none of the others did anything to make me feel better. So gym class was always a humiliating and painful experience that I came to dread.

As a result, as soon as I got out of school and had my own autonomy in how to structure my own life, I basically avoided exercise whenever I could. Even knowing that it was good for me—really, exercise is ridiculously good for you; it honestly doesn’t even make sense to me how good it is for you—I could rarely get myself to actually go out and exercise. I certainly couldn’t do it with anyone else; sometimes, if I was very disciplined, I could manage to maintain an exercise routine by myself, as long as there was no one else there who could watch me, judge me, or compare themselves to me.

In fact, I’d probably have avoided exercise even more, had I not also had some more positive experiences with it outside of school. I trained in martial arts for a few years, getting almost to a black belt in tae kwon do; I quit precisely when it started becoming very competitive and thus began to feel humiliated again when I performed worse than others. Part of me wishes I had stuck with it long enough to actually get the black belt; but the rest of me knows that even if I’d managed it, I would have been miserable the whole time and it probably would have made me dread exercise even more.

The details of my story are of course individual to me; but the general pattern is disturbingly common. A kid does poorly in gym class, or even suffers painful attacks of whatever disabling condition they have, but nobody sees it as a medical problem; they just see the kid as weak and lazy. Or even if the adults are sympathetic, the other kids aren’t; they just see a peer who performed worse than them, and they have learned by various subtle (and not-so-subtle) cultural pressures that anyone who performs worse at a culturally-important task is worthy of being bullied and shunned.

Even outside the directly competitive environment of sports, the very structure of a phys ed class, where a large group of students are all expected to perform the same athletic tasks and can directly compare their performance against each other, invites this kind of competition. Kids can see, right in their faces, who is doing better and who is doing worse. And our culture is astonishingly bad at teaching children (or anyone else, for that matter) how to be sympathetic to others who perform worse. Worse performance is worse character. Being bad at running, jumping and climbing is just being bad.

Part of the problem is that school administrators seem to see physical education as a training and selection regimen for their sports programs. (In fact, some of them seem to see their entire school as existing to serve their sports programs.) Here is a UK government report bemoaning the fact that “only a minority of schools play competitive sport to a high level”, apparently not realizing that this is necessarily true because high-level sports performance is a relative concept. Only one team can win the championship each year. Only 10% of students will ever be in the top 10% of athletes. No matter what. Anything else is literally mathematically impossible. We do not live in Lake Wobegon; not all the children can be above average.

There are good phys ed programs out there. They have highly-trained instructors and they focus on matching tasks to a student’s own skill level, as well as actually educating them—teaching them about anatomy and physiology rather than just making them run laps. Actually the one phys ed class I took that I actually enjoyed was actually an anatomy and physiology class; we didn’t do any physical exercise in that class. But well-taught phys ed classes are clearly the exception, not the norm.

Of course, it could be that some students actually benefit from phys ed, perhaps even enough to offset the harms to people like me. (Though then the question should be asked whether phys ed should be compulsory for all students—if an intervention helps some and hurts others, maybe only give it to the ones it helps?) But I know very few people who actually described their experiences of phys ed class as positive ones. While many students describe their experiences of math class in similarly-negative terms (which is also a problem with how math classes are taught), I definitely do know people who actually enjoyed and did well in math class. Still, my sample is surely biased—it’s comprised of people similar to me, and I hated gym and loved math. So let’s look at the actual data.

Or rather, I’d like to, but there isn’t that much out there. The empirical literature on the effects of physical education is surprisingly limited.

A lot of analyses of physical education simply take as axiomatic that more phys ed means more exercise, and so they use the—overwhelming, unassailable—evidence that exercise is good to support an argument for more phys ed classes. But they never seem to stop and take a look at whether phys ed classes are actually making kids exercise more, particularly once those kids grow up and become adults.

In fact, the surprisingly weak correlations between higher physical activity and better mental health among adolescents (despite really strong correlations in adults) could be because exercise among adolescents is largely coerced via phys ed, and the misery of being coerced into physical humiliation counteracts any benefits that might have been obtained from increased exercise.

The best long-term longitudinal study I can find did show positive effects of phys ed on long-term health, though by a rather odd mechanism: Women exercised more as adults if they had phys ed in primary school, but men didn’t; they just smoked less. And this study was back in 1999, studying a cohort of adults who had phys ed quite a long time ago, when it was better funded.

The best experiment I can find actually testing whether phys ed programs work used a very carefully designed phys ed program with a lot of features that it would be really nice to have, but the vast majority of actual gym classes do not, including carefully structured activities with specific developmental goals, and, perhaps most importantly, children were taught to track and evaluate their own individual progress rather than evaluate themselves in comparison to others.

And even then, the effects are not all that large. The physical activity scores of the treatment group rose from 932 minutes per week to 1108 minutes per week for first-graders, and from 1212 to 1454 for second-graders. But the physical activity scores of the control group rose from 906 to 996 for first-graders, and 1105 to 1211 for second-graders. So of the 176 minutes per week gained by first-graders, 90 would have happened anyway. Likewise, of the 242 minutes per week gained by second-graders, 106 were not attributable to the treatment. Only about half of the gains were due to the intervention, and they amount to about a 10% increase in overall physical activity. It also seems a little odd to me that the control groups both started worse off than the experimental groups and both groups gained; it raises some doubts about the randomization.

The researchers also measured psychological effects, and these effects are even smaller and honestly a little weird. On a scale of “somatic anxiety” (basically, how bad do you feel about your body’s physical condition?), this well-designed phys ed program only reduced scores in the treatment group from 4.95 to 4.55 among first-graders, and from 4.50 to 4.10 among second-graders. Seeing as the scores for second-graders also fell in the control group from 4.63 to 4.45, only about half of the observed reduction—0.2 points on a 10-point scale—is really attributable to the treatment. And the really baffling part is that the measure of social anxiety actually fell more, which makes me wonder if they’re really measuring what they think they are.

Clearly, exercise is good. We should be trying to get people to exercise more. Actually, this is more important than almost anything else we could do for public health, with the possible exception of vaccinations. All of these campaigns trying to get kids to lose weight should be removed and replaced with programs to get them to exercise more, because losing weight doesn’t benefit health and exercising more does.

But I am not convinced that physical education as we know it actually makes people exercise more. In the short run, it forces kids to exercise, when there were surely ways to get kids to exercise that didn’t require such coercion; and in the long run, it gives them painful, even traumatic memories of exercise that make them not want to continue it once they get older. It’s too competitive, too one-size-fits-all. It doesn’t account for innate differences in athletic ability or match challenge levels to skill levels. It doesn’t help kids cope with having less ability, or even teach kids to be compassionate toward others with less ability than them.

And it makes kids miserable.

Creativity and mental illness

pnrj cognitive science , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 1 JDN 2458819

There is some truth to the stereotype that artistic people are crazy. Mental illnesses, particularly bipolar disorder, are overrepresented among artists, writers, and musicians. Creative people score highly on literally all five of the Big Five personality traits: They are higher in Openness, higher in Conscientiousness, higher in Extraversion (that one actually surprised me), higher in Agreeableness, and higher in Neuroticism. Creative people just have more personality, it seems.

But in fact mental illness is not as overrepresented among creative people as most people think, and the highest probability of being a successful artist occurs when you have close relatives with mental illness, but are not yourself mentally ill. Those with mental illness actually tend to be most creative when their symptoms are in remission. This suggests that the apparent link between creativity and mental illness may actually increase over time, as treatments improve and remission becomes easier.

One possible source of the link is that artistic expression may be a form of self-medication: Art therapy does seem to have some promise in treating a variety of mental disorders (though it is not nearly as effective as therapy and medication). And that wouldn’t explain why family history of mental illness is actually a better predictor of creativity than mental illness itself.

My guess is that in order to be creative, you need to think differently than other people. You need to see the world in a way that others do not see it. Mental illness is surely not the only way to do that, but it’s definitely one way.

But creativity also requires basic functioning: If you are totally crippled by a mental illness, you’re not going to be very creative. So the people who are most creative have just enough craziness to think differently, but not so much that it takes over their lives.

This might even help explain how mental illness persisted in our population, despite its obvious survival disadvantages. It could be some form of heterozygote advantage.

The classic example of heterozygote advantage is sickle-cell anemia: If you have no copies of the sickle-cell gene, you’re normal. If you have two copies, you have sickle-cell anemia, which is very bad. But if you have only one copy, you’re healthy—and you’re resistant to malaria. Thus, high risk of malaria—as we certainly had, living in central Africa—creates a selection pressure that keeps sickle-cell genes in the population, even though having two copies is much worse than having none at all.

Mental illness might function something like this. I suspect it’s far more complicated than sickle-cell anemia, which is literally just two alleles of a single gene; but the overall process may be similar. If having just a little bit of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia makes you see the world differently than other people and makes you more creative, there are lots of reasons why that might improve the survival of your genes: There are the obvious problem-solving benefits, but also the simple fact that artists are sexy.

The downside of such “weird-thinking” genes is that they can go too far and make you mentally ill, perhaps if you have too many copies of them, or if you face an environmental trigger that sets them off. Sometimes the reason you see the world differently than everyone else is that you’re just seeing it wrong. But if the benefits of creativity are high enough—and they surely are—this could offset the risks, in an evolutionary sense.

But one thing is quite clear: If you are mentally ill, don’t avoid treatment for fear it will damage your creativity. Quite the opposite: A mental illness that is well treated and in remission is the optimal state for creativity. Go seek treatment, so that your creativity may blossom.

Mental illness is different from physical illness.

pnrj cognitive science, personal , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Post 311 Oct 13 JDN 2458770

There’s something I have heard a lot of people say about mental illness that is obviously well-intentioned, but ultimately misguided: “Mental illness is just like physical illness.”

Sometimes they say it explicitly in those terms. Other times they make analogies, like “If you wouldn’t shame someone with diabetes for using insulin, why shame someone with depression for using SSRIs?”

Yet I don’t think this line of argument will ever meaningfully reduce the stigma surrounding mental illness, because, well, it’s obviously not true.

There are some characteristics of mental illness that are analogous to physical illness—but there are some that really are quite different. And these are not just superficial differences, the way that pancreatic disease is different from liver disease. No one would say that liver cancer is exactly the same as pancreatic cancer; but they’re both obviously of the same basic category. There are differences between physical and mental illness which are both obvious, and fundamental.

Here’s the biggest one: Talk therapy works on mental illness.

You can’t talk yourself out of diabetes. You can’t talk yourself out of myocardial infarct. You can’t even talk yourself out of migraine (though I’ll get back to that one in a little bit). But you can, in a very important sense, talk yourself out of depression.

In fact, talk therapy is one of the most effective treatments for most mental disorders. Cognitive behavioral therapy for depression is on its own as effective as most antidepressants (with far fewer harmful side effects), and the two combined are clearly more effective than either alone. Talk therapy is as effective as medication on bipolar disorder, and considerably better on social anxiety disorder.

To be clear: Talk therapy is not just people telling you to cheer up, or saying it’s “all in your head”, or suggesting that you get more exercise or eat some chocolate. Nor does it consist of you ruminating by yourself and trying to talk yourself out of your disorder. Cognitive behavioral therapy is a very complex, sophisticated series of techniques that require years of expert training to master. Yet, at its core, cognitive therapy really is just a very sophisticated form of talking.

The fact that mental disorders can be so strongly affected by talk therapy shows that there really is an important sense in which mental disorders are “all in your head”, and not just the trivial way that an axe wound or even a migraine is all in your head. It isn’t just the fact that it is physically located in your brain that makes a mental disorder different; it’s something deeper than that.

Here’s the best analogy I can come up with: Physical illness is hardware. Mental illness is software.

If a computer breaks after being dropped on the floor, that’s like an axe wound: An obvious, traumatic source of physical damage that is an unambiguous cause of the failure.

If a computer’s CPU starts overheating, that’s like a physical illness, like diabetes: There may be no particular traumatic cause, or even any clear cause at all, but there is obviously something physically wrong that needs physical intervention to correct.

But if a computer is suffering glitches and showing error messages when it tries to run particular programs, that is like mental illness: Something is wrong not on the low-level hardware, but on the high-level software.

These different types of problem require different types of solutions. If your CPU is overheating, you might want to see about replacing your cooling fan or your heat sink. But if your software is glitching while your CPU is otherwise running fine, there’s no point in replacing your fan or heat sink. You need to get a programmer in there to look at the code and find out where it’s going wrong. A talk therapist is like a programmer: The words they say to you are like code scripts they’re trying to get your processor to run correctly.

Of course, our understanding of computers is vastly better than our understanding of human brains, and as a result, programmers tend to get a lot better results than psychotherapists. (Interestingly they do actually get paid about the same, though! Programmers make about 10% more on average than psychotherapists, and both are solidly within the realm of average upper-middle-class service jobs.) But the basic process is the same: Using your expert knowledge of the system, find the right set of inputs that will fix the underlying code and solve the problem. At no point do you physically intervene on the system; you could do it remotely without ever touching it—and indeed, remote talk therapy is a thing.

What about other neurological illnesses, like migraine or fibromyalgia? Well, I think these are somewhere in between. They’re definitely more physical in some sense than a mental disorder like depression. There isn’t any cognitive content to a migraine the way there is to a depressive episode. When I feel depressed or anxious, I feel depressed or anxious about something. But there’s nothing a migraine is about. To use the technical term in cognitive science, neurological disorders lack the intentionality that mental disorders generally have. “What are you depressed about?” is a question you usually can answer. “What are you migrained about?” generally isn’t.

But like mental disorders, neurological disorders are directly linked to the functioning of the brain, and often seem to operate at a higher level of functional abstraction. The brain doesn’t have pain receptors on itself the way most of your body does; getting a migraine behind your left eye doesn’t actually mean that that specific lobe of your brain is what’s malfunctioning. It’s more like a general alert your brain is sending out that something is wrong, somewhere. And fibromyalgia often feels like it’s taking place in your entire body at once. Moreover, most neurological disorders are strongly correlated with mental disorders—indeed, the comorbidity of depression with migraine and fibromyalgia in particular is extremely high.

Which disorder causes the other? That’s a surprisingly difficult question. Intuitively we might expect the “more physical” disorder to be the primary cause, but that’s not always clear. Successful treatment for depression often improves symptoms of migraine and fibromyalgia as well (though the converse is also true). They seem to be mutually reinforcing one another, and it’s not at all clear which came first. I suppose if I had to venture a guess, I’d say the pain disorders probably have causal precedence over the mood disorders, but I don’t actually know that for a fact.

To stretch my analogy a little, it may be like a software problem that ends up causing a hardware problem, or a hardware problem that ends up causing a software problem. There actually have been a few examples of this, like games with graphics so demanding that they caused GPUs to overheat.

The human brain is a lot more complicated than a computer, and the distinction between software and hardware is fuzzier; we don’t actually have “code” that runs on a “processor”. We have synapses that continually fire on and off and rewire each other. The closest thing we have to code that gets processed in sequence would be our genome, and that is several orders of magnitude less complex than the structure of our brains. Aside from simply physically copying the entire brain down to every synapse, it’s not clear that you could ever “download” a mind, science fiction notwithstanding.

Indeed, anything that changes your mind necessarily also changes your brain; the effects of talking are generally subtler than the effects of a drug (and certainly subtler than the effects of an axe wound!), but they are nevertheless real, physical changes. (This is why it is so idiotic whenever the popular science press comes out with: “New study finds that X actually changes your brain!” where X might be anything from drinking coffee to reading romance novels. Of course it does! If it has an effect on your mind, it did so by having an effect on your brain. That’s the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science.) This is not so different from computers, however: Any change in software is also a physical change, in the form of some sequence of electrical charges that were moved from one place to another. Actual physical electrons are a few microns away from where they otherwise would have been because of what was typed into that code.

Of course I want to reduce the stigma surrounding mental illness. (For both selfish and altruistic reasons, really.) But blatantly false assertions don’t seem terribly productive toward that goal. Mental illness is different from physical illness; we can’t treat it the same.

Impostor Syndrome

pnrj education, personal , , , , ,

Feb 24 JDN 2458539

You probably have experienced Impostor Syndrome, even if you didn’t know the word for it. (Studies estimate that over 70% of the general population, and virtually 100% of graduate students, have experienced it at least once.)

Impostor Syndrome feels like this:

All your life you’ve been building up accomplishments, and people kept praising you for them, but those things were easy, or you’ve just gotten lucky so far. Everyone seems to think you are highly competent, but you know better: Now that you are faced with something that’s actually hard, you can’t do it. You’re not sure you’ll ever be able to do it. You’re scared to try because you know you’ll fail. And now you fear that at any moment, your whole house of cards is going to come crashing down, and everyone will see what a fraud and a failure you truly are.

The magnitude of that feeling varies: For most people it can be a fleeting experience, quickly overcome. But for some it is chronic, overwhelming, and debilitating.

It may surprise you that I am in the latter category. A few years ago, I went to a seminar on Impostor Syndrome, and they played a “Bingo” game where you collect spaces by exhibiting symptoms: I won.

In a group of about two dozen students who were there specifically because they were worried about Impostor Syndrome, I exhibited the most symptoms. On the Clance Impostor Phenomenon Scale, I score 90%. Anything above 60% is considered diagnostic, though there is no DSM disorder specifically for Impostor Syndrome.

Another major cause of Impostor Syndrome is being an underrepresented minority. Women, people of color, and queer people are at particularly high risk. While men are less likely to experience Impostor Syndrome, we tend to experience it more intensely when we do.

Aside from being a graduate student, which is basically coextensive with Impostor Syndrome, being a writer seems to be one of the strongest predictors of Impostor Syndrome. Megan McArdle of The Atlantic theorizes that it’s because we were too good in English class, or, more precisely, that English class was much too easy for us. We came to associate our feelings of competence and accomplishment with tasks simply coming so easily we barely even had to try.

But I think there’s a bigger reason, which is that writers face rejection letters. So many rejection letters. 90% of novels are rejected at the query stage; then a further 80% are rejected at the manuscript review stage; this means that a given query letter has about a 2% chance of acceptance. This means that even if you are doing everything right and will eventually get published, you can on average expected 50 rejection letters. I collected a little over 20 and ran out of steam, my will and self-confidence utterly crushed. But statistically I should have continued for at least 30 more. In fact, it’s worse than that; you should always expect to continue 50 more, up until you finally get accepted—this is a memoryless distribution. And if always having to expect to wait for 50 more rejection letters sounds utterly soul-crushing, that’s because it is.

And that’s something fiction writing has in common with academic research. Top journals in economics have acceptance rates between 3% and 8%. I’d say this means you need to submit between 13 and 34 times to get into a top journal, but that’s nonsense; there are only 5 top journals in economics. So it’s more accurate to say that with any given paper, no matter how many times you submit, you only have about a 30% chance of getting into a top journal. After that, your submissions will necessarily not be to top journals. There are enough good second-tier journals that you can probably get into one eventually—after submitting about a dozen times. And maybe a hiring or tenure committee will care about a second-tier publication. It might count for something. But it’s those top 5 journals that really matter. If for every paper you have in JEBO or JPubE, another candidate has a paper in AER or JPE, they’re going to hire the other candidate. Your paper could use better methodology on a more important question, and be better written—but if for whatever reason AER didn’t like it, that’s what will decide the direction of your career.

If I were trying to design a system that would inflict maximal Impostor Syndrome, I’m not sure I could do much better than this. I guess I’d probably have just one top journal instead of five, and I’d make the acceptance rate 1% instead of 3%. But this whole process of high-stakes checkpoints and low chances of getting on a tenure track that will by no means guarantee actually getting tenure? That’s already quite well-optimized. It’s really a brilliant design, if that’s the objective. You select a bunch of people who have experienced nothing but high achievement their whole lives. If they ever did have low achievement, for whatever reason (could be no fault of their own, you don’t care), you’d exclude them from the start. You give them a series of intensely difficult tasks—tasks literally no one else has ever done that may not even be possible—with minimal support and utterly irrelevant and useless “training”, and evaluate them constantly at extremely high stakes. And then at the end you give them an almost negligible chance of success, and force even those who do eventually succeed to go through multiple steps of failure and rejection beforehand. You really maximize the contrast between how long a streak of uninterrupted successes they must have had in order to be selected in the first place, and how many rejections they have to go through in order to make it to the next level.

(By the way, it’s not that there isn’t enough teaching and research for all these PhD graduates; that’s what universities want you to think. It’s that universities are refusing to open up tenure-track positions and instead relying upon adjuncts and lecturers. And the obvious reason for that is to save money.)

The real question is why we let them put us through this. I’m wondering that more and more every day.

I believe in science. I believe I could make a real contribution to human knowledge—at least, I think I still believe that. But I don’t know how much longer I can stand this gauntlet of constant evaluation and rejection.

I am going through a particularly severe episode of Impostor Syndrome at the moment. I am at an impasse in my third-year research paper, which is supposed to be done by the end of the summer. My dissertation committee wants me to revise my second-year paper to submit to journals, and I just… can’t do it. I have asked for help from multiple sources, and received conflicting opinions. At this point I can’t even bring myself to work on it.

I’ve been aiming for a career as an academic research scientist for as long as I can remember, and everyone tells me that this is what I should do and where I belong—but I don’t really feel like I belong anymore. I don’t know if I have a thick enough skin to get through all these layers of evaluation and rejection. Everyone tells me I’m good at this, but I don’t feel like I am. It doesn’t come easily the way I had come to expect things to come easily. And after I’ve done the research, written the paper—the stuff that I was told was the real work—there are all these extra steps that are actually so much harder, so much more painful—submitting to journals and being rejected over, and over, and over again, practically watching the graph of my career prospects plummet before my eyes.

I think that what really triggered my Impostor Syndrome was finally encountering things I’m not actually good at. It sounds arrogant when I say it, but the truth is, I had never had anything in my entire academic experience that felt genuinely difficult. There were things that were tedious, or time-consuming; there were other barriers I had to deal with, like migraines, depression, and the influenza pandemic. But there was never any actual educational content I had difficulty absorbing and understanding. Maybe if I had, I would be more prepared for this. But of course, if that were the case, they’d never let me into grad school at all. Just to be here, I had to have an uninterrupted streak of easy success after easy success—so now that it’s finally hard, I feel completely blindsided. I’m finally genuinely challenged by something academic, and I can’t handle it. There’s math I don’t know how to do; I’ve never felt this way before.

I know that part of the problem is internal: This is my own mental illness talking. But that isn’t much comfort. Knowing that the problem is me doesn’t exactly reduce the feeling of being a fraud and a failure. And even a problem that is 100% inside my own brain isn’t necessarily a problem I can fix. (I’ve had migraines in my brain for the last 18 years; I still haven’t fixed them.)

There is so much that the academic community could do so easily to make this problem better. Stop using the top 5 journals as a metric, and just look at overall publication rates. Referee publications double-blind, so that grad students know their papers will actually be read and taken seriously, rather than thrown out as soon as the referee sees they don’t already have tenure. Or stop obsessing over publications all together, and look at the detailed content of people’s work instead of maximizing the incentive to keep putting out papers that nobody will ever actually read. Open up more tenure-track faculty positions, and stop hiring lecturers and adjuncts. If you have to save money, do it by cutting salaries for administrators and athletic coaches. And stop evaluating constantly. Get rid of qualifying exams. Get rid of advancement exams. Start from the very beginning of grad school by assigning a mentor to each student and getting directly into working on a dissertation. Don’t make the applied econometrics researchers take exams in macro theory. Don’t make the empirical macroeconomists study game theory. Focus and customize coursework specifically on what grad students will actually need for the research they want to do, and don’t use grades at all. Remove the evaluative element completely. We should feel as though we are allowed to not know things. We should feel as though we are allowed to get things wrong. You are supposed to be teaching us, and you don’t seem to know how to do that; you just evaluate us constantly and expect us to learn on our own.

But none of those changes are going to happen. Certainly not in time for me, and probably not ever, because people like me who want the system to change are precisely the people the current system seems designed to weed out. It’s the ones who make it through the gauntlet, and convince themselves that it was their own brilliance and hard work that carried them through (not luck, not being a White straight upper-middle-class cis male, not even perseverance and resilience in the face of rejection), who end up making the policies for the next generation.

Because those who should be fixing the problem refuse to do so, that leaves the rest of us. What can we do to relieve Impostor Syndrome in ourselves or those around us?

You’d be right to take any advice I give now with a grain of salt; it’s obviously not working that well on me. But maybe it can help someone else. (And again I realize that “Don’t listen to me, I have no idea what I’m talking about” is exactly what someone with Impostor Syndrome would say.)

One of the standard techniques for dealing with Impostor Syndrome is called self-compassion. The idea is to be as forgiving to yourself as you would be to someone you love. I’ve never been good at this. I always hold myself to a much higher standard than I would hold anyone else—higher even than I would allow anyone to impose on someone else. After being told my whole life how brilliant and special I am, I internalized it in perhaps the most toxic way possible: I set my bar higher. Things that other people would count as great success I count as catastrophic failure. “Good enough” is never good enough.

Another good suggestion is to change your comparison set: Don’t compare yourself just to faculty or other grad students, compare yourself to the population as a whole. Others will tell you to stop comparing altogether, but I don’t know if that’s even possible in a capitalist labor market.

I’ve also had people encourage me to focus on my core motivations, remind myself what really matters and why I want to be a scientist in the first place. But it can be hard to keep my eye on that prize. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever be able to do the things I originally set out to do, or if it’s trying to fit other people’s molds and being rejected repeatedly over and over again for the rest of my life.

I think the best advice I’ve ever received on dealing with Impostor Syndrome was actually this: “Realize that nobody knows what they’re doing.” The people who are the very best at things… really aren’t all that good at them. If you look around carefully, the evidence of incompetence is everywhere. Look at all the books that get published that weren’t worth writing, all the songs that get recorded that weren’t worth singing. Think about the easily-broken electronic gadgets, the glitchy operating systems, the zero-day exploits, the data breaches, the traffic lights that are timed so badly they make the traffic jams worse. Remember that the leading cause of airplane crashes is pilot error, that medical mistakes are the third-leading cause of death in the United States. Think about every vending machine that ate your dollar, every time your cable went out in a storm. All those people around you who look like they are competent and successful? They aren’t. They are just as confused and ignorant and clumsy as you are. Most of them also feel like frauds, at least some of the time.

If you really want grad students to have better mental health, remove all the high-stakes checkpoints

pnrj education, ethics, heuristics and biases, personal, public policy , , , , , , , , ,

Post 260: Oct 14 JDN 2458406

A study was recently published in Nature Biotechnology showing clear evidence of a mental health crisis among graduate students (no, I don’t know why they picked the biotechnology imprint—I guess it wasn’t good enough for Nature proper?). This is only the most recent of several studies showing exceptionally high rates of mental health issues among graduate students.

I’ve seen universities do a lot of public hand-wringing and lip service about this issue—but I haven’t seen any that were seriously willing to do what it takes to actually solve the problem.

I think this fact became clearest to me when I was required to fill out an official “Individual Development Plan” form as a prerequisite for my advancement to candidacy, which included one question about “What are you doing to support your own mental health and work/life balance?”

The irony here is absolutely excruciating, because advancement to candidacy has been overwhelmingly my leading source of mental health stress for at least the last six months. And it is only one of several different high-stakes checkpoints that grad students are expected to complete, always threatened with defunding or outright expulsion from the graduate program if the checkpoint is not met by a certain arbitrary deadline.

The first of these was the qualifying exams. Then comes advancement to candidacy. Then I have to complete and defend a second-year paper, then a third-year paper. Finally I have to complete and defend a dissertation, and then go onto the job market and go through a gauntlet of applications and interviews. I can’t think of any other time in my life when I was under this much academic and career pressure this consistently—even finishing high school and applying to college wasn’t like this.

If universities really wanted to improve my mental health, they would find a way to get rid of all that.

Granted, a single university does not have total control over all this: There are coordination problems between universities regarding qualifying exams, advancement, and dissertation requirements. One university that unilaterally tried to remove all these would rapidly lose prestige, as it would not be regarded as “rigorous” to reduce the pressure on your grad students. But that itself is precisely the problem—we have equated “rigor” with pressuring grad students until they are on the verge of emotional collapse. Universities don’t seem to know how to make graduate school difficult in the ways that would actually encourage excellence in research and teaching; they simply know how to make it difficult in ways that destroy their students psychologically.

The job market is even more complicated; in the current funding environment, it would be prohibitively expensive to open up enough faculty positions to actually accept even half of all graduating PhDs to tenure-track jobs. Probably the best answer here is to refocus graduate programs on supporting employment outside academia, recognizing both that PhD-level skills are valuable in many workplaces and that not every grad student really wants to become a professor.

But there are clearly ways that universities could mitigate these effects, and they don’t seem genuinely interested in doing so. They could remove the advancement exam, for example; you could simply advance to candidacy as a formality when your advisor decides you are ready, never needing to actually perform a high-stakes presentation before a committee—because what the hell does that accomplish anyway? Speaking of advisors, they could have a formalized matching process that starts with interviewing several different professors and being matched to the one that best fits your goals and interests, instead of expecting you to reach out on your own and hope for the best. They could have you write a dissertation, but not perform a “dissertation defense”—because, again, what can they possibly learn from forcing you to present in a high-stakes environment that they couldn’t have learned from reading your paper and talking with you about it over several months?

They could adjust or even remove funding deadlines—especially for international students. Here at UCI at least, once you are accepted to the program, you are ostensibly guaranteed funding for as long as you maintain reasonable academic progress—but then they define “reasonable progress” in such a way that you have to form an advancement committee, fill out forms, write a paper, and present before a committee all by a certain date or your funding is in jeopardy. Residents of California (which includes all US students who successfully established residency after a full year) are given more time if we need it—but international students aren’t. How is that fair?

The unwillingness of universities to take such actions clearly shows that their commitment to improving students’ mental health is paper-thin. They are only willing to help their students improve their work-life balance as long as it doesn’t require changing anything about the graduate program. They will provide us with counseling services and free yoga classes, but they won’t seriously reduce the pressure they put on us at every step of the way.
I understand that universities are concerned about protecting their prestige, but I ask them this: Does this really improve the quality of your research or teaching output? Do you actually graduate better students by selecting only the ones who can survive being emotionally crushed? Do all these arbitrary high-stakes performances actually result in greater advancement of human knowledge?

Or is it perhaps that you yourselves were put through such hazing rituals years ago, and now your cognitive dissonance won’t let you admit that it was all for naught? “This must be worth doing, or else they wouldn’t have put me through so much suffering!” Are you trying to transfer your own psychological pain onto your students, lest you be forced to face it yourself?