I am a 29-year-old guy who has suffered and survived mental harassment at the hands of his PhD advisor. I joined a reputed PhD program in the United States in 2015, with high hopes and ample drive to become a formidable scientist. Alas, I found out the hard way that hopes and drive are not enough to help you succeed. Your colleagues and bosses are equally important, if not more.
On paper, my PhD advisor is an intelligent, scientifically sound and ethical person who would stand by a student in tough times and guide them through harrowing experimental debacles. But reality added more dimensions to her personality.
After 4 months of blissful lab training and coursework, there came a meeting in which my advisor stared into my eyes for 90 minutes straight, listing everything that was wrong with me. She told me, without reasonable explanation, how I was an arrogant, careless and hostile person and how she would send me back to my home country if I didn’t fall in line. That meeting was the first time I cried about a work-related issue. Such was my state of mind after this meeting that I accidentally rushed into a women’s toilet only to realize this 15 minutes later.
In the months that followed, my advisor began employing antics that I would not have expected from an adult human of sound mind. During our meetings, her anger at any mistakes I made in my experiments was unbearably conspicuous. In these meetings, she would often yell “get out” at me, even forcefully opening the door to guide me out on one occasion. In fact, in her anger during these unavoidable meetings, she began banging her table, cupboard drawers and office door with a physical force she could legally not use against me directly.
While I was not scared by these tactics, I was thoroughly disturbed. I could no longer focus on my lab work and eventually ended up being so nervous that my experiments – which required performing surgeries on rats – began to fail miserably. My hands would start shaking uncontrollably every time she accompanied me to an animal surgery, after which I was yelled at by her even more. I became so tremendously aware of her presence around me that the moment I heard her keys jingle as she entered our lab door, I would become unusually alert and try to escape the room. I started avoiding any face-to-face contact with her as much as I could, hiding away in washrooms or breakrooms whenever possible.
The height of my advisor’s harassing behavior was reached when she banished me, quite literally, from coming to the lab because she believed that I was “feeding misinformation” about her to my lab mates. I was unceremoniously “handed over” to another professor in a building located more than 2 km away from my originally assigned workspace. Here, I spent almost 4 months, away from the emotional and intellectual support of my friends and colleagues in the lab.
Three years into it, I had thought of quitting the PhD program. I had shared my plans with my family and close friends and our graduate student coordinator. However, I decided to suffer through this harassment for another year after my advisor hinted that I was nearing the end of my degree requirements. I know people will have different opinions of whether or not this decision was the right one. At the time, it felt like the right thing to do, especially when I thought of the time I had already invested in my PhD and the different ways in which a decision to drop out would affect my future chances in the field of scientific research.
After spending 4 years in the program, I earned my PhD and left not only the lab and the university, but also the field of scientific research for good. Now, I am a freelance writer trying to start anew in a field I think is the only way out for me after years of mental trauma – because it gives me a chance to channel my anger into producing something creative.
I have discovered through experience that sharing your story with others is the best way to cope with mental harassment. I used to feel quite isolated and angry at the way I was being treated by my advisor every day. I was fortunate to have friends and confidantes to share my story with, to vent out in front of, and to garner emotional support from. By sharing my story with these people, I learned more about what everyone else was going through in their PhDs. I found out that many other people were suffering different forms of mental harassment in the workplace. After I communicated my woes to them, they felt confident enough to share their stories with me. Some even decided to take official action against their respective advisors, some decided to leave their labs and join new ones so they would not have to suffer through what I did, some talked directly to their advisors and made their situations clear. Everyone has a different mechanism of coping with mental harassment, and I am not going to judge anyone for it. All I am going to say is that it is best to find someone to talk to about your grievances, to share your experiences and, in the process, help and be helped.
The Roaring Kotzilla 