Background: Mental Health in Academia
Recent evidence on the state of mental health among academics paints an alarming picture. Faculty members and PhD students around the world run a high risk of developing mental health issues, such as psychological distress, anxiety, depression, and burnout, at some point in their career. Many of them seek professional help either through their institution or on their own as the availability of institutional support structures varies greatly across universities.
Overall, studies consistently point to a much higher prevalence of mental health issues among academics compared to most other working populations. COVID-19 has intensified work-related stress for many scholars, but the problem clearly predates the pandemic. The structural conditions of academic work, such as high publication pressure, fierce competition, and a culture of constant evaluation, are known to contribute to unhealthy levels of occupational stress.
The Publish and Perish Project
The Publish and Perish project specifically addresses the situation of mental health and emotional wellbeing among academics in the field of media and communication studies. The overall goal of this endeavor is to gauge the scale of the problem in the discipline, identify structural conditions that produce greater vulnerability among individuals, and point to potential ways of improving the situation.
Initiated and coordinated by Thomas Hanitzsch and Antonia Markiewitz (both from the Department of Media and Communication at LMU Munich) together with Henrik Bødker (Department of Media and Journalism Studies at Aarhus University), the study is supported by several international associations of media and communication scholars, notably the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), Asociación Latinoamericana de Investigadores de la Comunicación (ALAIC), European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), and the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR).
