Volunteering
We are currently looking for a team member to assist with visibility and promotion. Please check out these details and get in touch!
Contributions
We enthusiastically welcome contributions to the site! Currently, we are actively looking to build our list of regular contributors. We also welcome one-time guest posts. Please contact amhcollective@gmail.com if you are interested in contributing.
Contributions generally fall the following categories:
General Blog Posts
General blog posts are open to any topic that is relevant to graduate school and mental health. They can focus on mental illness or on mental health promotion more generally. For example, you could:
- Review a helpful book or other resource
- Describe steps you’ve taken to help a friend struggling with mental health issues
- Share a tip for maintaining good mental health in grad school
Aim for 500-800 words for blog posts. We will work with you to edit the post if needed, to make sure it is clear and generally consistent with the voice and focus of our blog.
We will generally include your name and a short bio at the end of the post, but we can be flexible if that doesn’t work for you (see above).
Artistic Content
We welcome artistic content (e.g.., poetry, drawings, or other art) relevant to mental health among graduate students.
Personal Story Posts
If you have struggled with mental illness as a grad student, post-doc, or during another academic position, please consider sharing your story. Graduate students who struggle with mental illness (e.g., depression, anxiety disorders, phobia, personality disorders, and the like) can often feel very alone and your story can help combat that. We recognize that not everyone has access to a clinical diagnosis and/or therapy, so you can self-identify as someone with mental illness.
The format of your story is flexible, but we suggest a narrative format describing your struggle with mental illness and how it has or is affecting your grad school experience. Down the line, we hope to use our collection of stories to develop guidelines and strategies to help universities and colleges better support graduate students with mental illness, so it would be helpful if you can identify things that your institution could have done better to help you cope (and things they did well, if applicable).
The length of your story may depend on how much you have to say. If you would like to fit it into one post, we suggest 1000 words or less. However, you can also publish your story in instalments if you have more to say about your mental health journey. We will provide copy-editing of your personal story to make sure it is clear and error-free.
Your story can be anonymous (e.g., use a pseudonym and redact the name and location of your university) or, if you feel comfortable doing so, we can include your name and a short bio.
If anonymity is very important to you, please note that we will make every effort to safeguard your privacy and we would never knowingly share any personal details if you choose to publish an anonymous story with us. However, there are 6-8 of us working on the site and given that graduate school can be a small world, it’s possible that one of us knows someone who knows you. If you have a very serious confidentiality concern, you may wish to set up a new email account using a pseudonym.
Academic Mental Health Collective 