13 - On getting ‘hung-up’ and other assorted illnesses

Summary

A discourse concerning Researchers, wherein the nature of their mental health problems is discussed and illustrated

All of us involved in graduate education have watched the agony of many students choosing a dissertation topic, getting ‘hung up’ in the middle of the project, stopping work in black despair. And we have watched either ourselves or our colleagues refusing to send a paper to a journal editor in order to ‘perfect’ it – and then sitting for days in front of the paper doing no perfecting, in an impotent anxiety stupor.

Most of us also have had bright daydreams of universal acclaim, of the non-existent book review that starts: ‘this is a great book, which will revolutionize the discipline …’ And we have had the conviction, in dark moments, that all our efforts are play-acting for the petty rewards that universities dispose. We have known people, or are people, who are excellent scholars who never manage to finish anything. We have seen brilliant cocktail-party sociologists or biologists be let go for ‘not producing.’

In short, we have seen every conceivable neurotic symptom interfere with our own or others' research. In hardly any other profession do neurotic problems incapacitate so many people such a large part of the time. I would guess that such mental health problems add an average of a year to the Ph.D. program, mostly in the dissertation ‘hang-up.’ Even among those who get a research degree and are recommended for scholarly promise to leading universities, a very large percentage of assistant professors fail to do enough to justify keeping them on.