How academia’s ‘lone wolf’ culture is harming researcher mental health

Academia’s focus on individual achievement can be a breeding ground for poor mental health, says astrophysicist Kelly Korreck.

Korreck, who experienced pandemic-related burnout while working on NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, describes a competitive and ultimately damaging ‘lone wolf’ culture. She is joined by psychologist Desiree Dickerson to discuss how a stronger focus on group success can better protect researchers.

Dickerson also calls for improved onboarding processes for early career researchers. They should involve clear conversations about looming challenges, including first person accounts from people who faced work-related stress, anger, anxiety and depression, she argues.

“If we only value papers and funding, then of course, we protect those who have great papers and bring in lots of funding. We don’t look after the well-being of the people who actually need to be looked after,” she says.

Social and clinical psychologist Ciro De Vincenzo reflects on the positive emotions he felt and witnessed during a fieldwork project as part of his research into migration patterns in the European Union.

In contract, his experience of academic life at the University of Padua, Italy, was often less positive, pervaded by a strong sense of imposter syndrome and professional isolation. But being elected to the university senate enabled him to explore the systemic changes needed to improve researcher mental health, he says.

And finally, Tammy Steeves, a conservation genomicist at the University of Canterbury in Chistchurch, New Zealand, describes her involvement in the Kindness in Science initiative, a movement to counter many of the perverse incentives that pervade academia, and its achievements to date.

This is the final episode of this eight-part podcast series Mind matters: academia’s mental health crisis.

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