Hello! I’m Genevieve, a white Hispanic woman living on the Coast Salish territories of Canada (Vancouver). Instead of finishing my grad school studies with the PhD in Social Psychology like I had planned, I graduated with my MA and promptly bid Academia goodbye. It took me a year after I left academia to realise that I had been depressed and anxious for most of my grad school experience, and two years later I’m still in the process of healing. And one of the main reasons it took me so long was a lack of accessible resources dedicated to identifying and treating mental illness within the grad school system – not because they didn’t exist, but because people didn’t talk about them and what did exist was hard to find for someone in my position.
I have many stories to share with you: most of them centre on my experiences, but some of them will be about shared experiences I’ve come to understand are part of the “grad school experience”. I want to share with you how it is that I can say in the same breath that I both revile and dearly love Academia.
Some of my stories will reflect on the Institutions we live and work in that repress healthy coping behaviours in the name of perfection and competition, while some of them will be about the irony of being a student of Psychology and facing barriers in my own department that went against everything I had learned in this discipline.
I hope that you find support in the stories on this site and resources to help you understand your own situation better. I hope that you find helpful resources, and learn ways to cope that go beyond “exercise and eating right”.
Welcome to the Academic Mental Health Collective. I hope you enjoy your visit.
Academic Mental Health Collective 
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