Mental Health & Wellbeing of Staff who Support PGRs
On February 5th, we held the last in our series of events on mental health and wellbeing, this time focussing on staff who support doctoral candidates. The event was led by Professor Craig Martin and Dr Nicola Palmer (Co-Chairs of the Research Supervisors’ Network) and held under the Chatham House Rule.
Professor Craig Martin welcomed attendees and introduced the session, which built on findings from the UK Research Supervision Survey 2024 Report, such as the fact that 30% of respondents said that supervision had kept them awake at night and 28% said that supervision made them feel anxious. Dr Nicola Palmer added some remarks on her personal experience of supervision and said that expectations from students that a supervisor cam “support all sorts of things that happen in the life cycle of a doctoral candidate” – such as family or emotional issues – can add pressure. She had also observed that anxiety amongst supervisors about “doing things properly” has increased.
To begin, attendees joined breakout rooms to discuss what formal support structures were already available for staff at their universities. Following this exercise, Professor Martin introduced the speaker: Dr Katherine Parker-Hay (UX Researcher and Content Strategist, Open Library of Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London) who is the author of a report: The Supervisor’s Voice: Perspectives on the Values and Boundaries of the Supervisory Role.
Dr Parker-Hay explained that she had read several reports in which it was found that PGRs neglected professional development if it was perceived as a distraction to their research, and this inspired her to do her own report on the topic. She explained that the PhD is based on the ‘apprentice model’ of learning in which a candidate is paired with an expert to absorb institutional and disciplinary knowledge. She argued that – even though the PhD has been overtaken by new considerations such as employability – old ideas about doctoral study being “a labour of love rather than work” persisted. Therefore, supervisors are often dealing with multiple layers of conflicting expectations.
A key consequence of this, she explained, was that supervisors worried about giving students the impression that an academic job was a certainty after completing their doctorate. However, thinking about the apprentice model, they were often focussed on helping the student to build an identity within a narrow field of study, which inevitably led to raised expectations that they were going to become a faculty member within the Higher Education landscape.
Dr Parker-Hay then moved on to look in more detail at mental health and wellbeing. She said that supervisors were conceptualising the PhD as a difficult journey with lots of ups and downs, which made it difficult to distinguish between a “bump in the road” for their students and a mental health issue. She then discussed the problem of signposting students who needed help, adding that it was “more difficult than it looks” because supervisors don’t always know about the inner workings of student support within their institutions.
Finally, Dr Parker-Hay concluded by discussing the following points:
- The mental health of PGRs and their supervisors is linked.
- To signpost ethically, supervisors need to have a deeper institutional knowledge.
- Wellbeing training should be context-specific.
- Professional development tools should be framed carefully.
The event ended with a final breakout session (discussing “What can we do as a network to support each other”) and a Q&A.