Beatha Coaching

Over the past year I have been very fortunate to work with an outstanding team at the University of Stirling, who brought me in to help develop a mental health aware coaching programme for their research postgraduates. As part of this programme I have the opportunity to offer some training to PhD supervisors about mental health awareness in the supervisory relationship. This month’s blog is a reflection on some of the themes that are emerging as I prepare that workshop, and some thoughts to help guide those of you who are in a supervisory role.

Consider your own experience

It is easy to view our own experience of the PhD process as definitive. This may be especially true if we had a more traditional route through the academy, or approached the doctorate from the get-go with the intention of joining HE. However, it is increasingly the case that doctoral students come to their PhD from a range of backgrounds and life-paths, and with quite varied aims for their research. Too many of the conflicts that can emerge in a supervisory relationship develop from the supervisor’s assumption that there is a particular way to work with candidates, or that all PhD researchers have the same underlying knowledge, experience, and career plans.

It is worth stopping to ask yourself what you are bringing to supervision. This can work for positives as well as negatives. Perhaps you are bringing some assumptions about a candidate’s long-term aims that need to be checked. But you may also be bringing a determination to be a supportive mentor, or to treat your supervisees as research colleagues and valuable members of the department. Our experiences in academia can impact on the stories we then carry through in our values, behaviours, and choices. Before launching into supervision, or if you are finding that a relationship is struggling, take some time to consider how your approach has been impacted by your own particular experience.

Clarify what they are expecting

I have known the word ‘expect’ to raise the hackles on a stressed and overburdened academic supervisor so let me first clarify what I mean here – all of us bring certain expectations to everything we engage with. These expectations will be based on information, probably partial and incomplete, and interpretations based on past experience that may or may not be relevant. Both you and your supervisees will bring expectations, and they may not match up. It is worth pausing to think about your own expectations, especially the unspoken ones. Perhaps you have an expectation that supervisees will appreciate how busy you are and not email too frequently, or that they will automatically work with you through written drafts on which you provide comments. As with my previous point, these expectations can be assumed to be universal whereas in fact they often need to be spelled out.

For a PhD candidate coming to you from another institution, a different country, or from an established career outside the sector, your expectations may be very different from theirs. For example, perhaps they come from a department that emphasised pastoral care and socialising between academics and students and have expectations of a similar relationship with you. If they come from a non-academic background, they may anticipate certain parameters for meetings such as agendas and minute taking, and be used to having their work monitored and directed much more closely. In both these cases, the candidate may be deeply thrown, upset, and anxious if they find themselves facing unspoken expectations that differ from what they had expected.

Therefore…

Ask open questions, and adjust

Most conflicts between PhD candidates and supervisors can be solved by the simple expedient of finding out more about the individuals you are working with and having open communication with them. Because of the assumed norms in the sector, I have known a lot of supervisors to engage in a workmanlike relationship with their doctoral candidates that focuses exclusively on the progress of their research. There is a certain logic to this, but I suspect it is rooted more in lack of time and mental capacity than a thought-through approach. The model of PhD supervision that limits communication to the thesis mimics that of undergraduate and masters dissertations; however, PhD candidates are not undergraduate scholars – they are older, they often have families and caring responsibilities, they will likely be working within or outwith the academy alongside their research, they are engaging in a professional practice usually linked in some way to their career. A lack of understanding of these factors can severely inhibit your ability to successfully supervise a candidate – simply put, without all the information you cannot give relevant guidance and advice.

I have known some supervisors to be anxious about boundaries, worrying that by ‘making small talk’ with their doctoral students they will be encouraging an intimacy and familiarity that they can’t then follow-through. However, what I am proposing is not shifting the dynamic from supervisor-supervisee to something more friendly, but rather acting as an appropriately informed and skilled manager by informing yourself about your candidate’s life and the factors that may be affecting their progress and their understanding of the process. For example, if a PhD student has a job in another sector, have you found out about that work and how it relates to the PhD? For many established academics the assumption is that a candidate will start in HE from the lowest rung and take a traditional approach to moving up from their doctorate – but what if your student is already engaged in research in another sector and publishing there? Or perhaps they already teach or present at conferences and have done for years. In both these cases, the norms of gaining publication or teaching experience ‘for the CV’ may actually be quite superfluous, and other skills need to be developed instead. As the supervisor, the onus is on you to ask these questions and adjust your guidance accordingly.

Which brings me to my next point…

Remember the power dynamic

At this current time in UK HE, it is easy to forget that as well as an unhealthy power dynamic between institutions and staff, there are also active internal power dynamics of which the PhD supervisor – supervisee is one of the most significant. If you are feeling overworked, at risk, underappreciated, and disempowered, you may have lost sight of the fact that your PhD students are in an almost entirely dependent position in relation to you. As such, you wield a huge amount of disciplinary power over your candidates, and their behaviours and wellbeing can be significantly affected by awareness of your gaze and feeling the need to perform acceptability.

I am aware that many academics currently uncomfortable with the public discourse around duty of care that has arisen from distressing cases like that of Natasha Abrahart. I am pointing to something a little different here though. Being conscious of the power you hold, and wielding it with care, is less a demand that you shift your supervisory behaviours to something more pastoral, and more a reminder that power is everywhere and we are not solely victims within it we are also agents. In the same way, I hold a measure of power in my coaching sessions with clients and have to be conscious of signs that they are looking to please and become acceptable to me rather than expressing and developing their individual agency. As a final point here, remember that, as Ahmed points out, it is easier for some students to ‘pass’ within institutions than others. What assumptions are you bringing to supervision from your own context and background that may need to be reconsidered for students of a different race, cultural background, gender, or embodied experience to your own?

Be conscious of signs of distress

With all students (and, I would add, colleagues), no matter the difference in background, there are some consistent signs of distress that are common across all humans and can be identified through awareness. These are the fairly predictable embodied reactions of the ANS (the autonomic nervous system) when we are under stress. Even without mental health training, as a supervisor you can learn to spot signs of dysregulation in your students and ask questions. Doing so may prevent much more serious issues from developing later on.

Fight/flight or hyperarousal – in a hyperaroused state someone is experiencing the physiological reaction fight/flight, specifically a rush of adrenaline and cortisol causing a raised heart-beat, rapid short respiration, increased body heat and sweating, rapid or stumbling speech, difficulty answering complex questions, a tight throat and chest, an upset stomach, needing to urinate or defecate, tearfulness or irritability. In other words, this state is one of anxiety or fear that is pushing the body to react in a way that will remove the threat or remove itself from the threat. You can recognise signs of hyperarousal in a student if they are always rushing, look shaky or twitchy and unsettled, take a lot of notes, ask a lot of questions, or appear angry, upset or confused. In high-functioning individuals these symptoms may present merely as mild nervousness, but you will see hyperarousal in other ways, specifically perfectionism, overwork, and presenteeism. Unfortunately, these symptoms of distress can often be overlooked or even praised in academia, so it is vital that you don’t merely dismiss a student as hard working but actually check-in with their welfare and discuss balance and whether they need additional support.

Freeze or hypoarousal – in a hypoaroused state someone is experiencing a dorsal brake or freeze state, in which the dorsal branch of the vagus nerve has kicked in to put the body in a protective state. In hypoarousal someone will have a lowered heart-beat and blood pressure, slow breathing, may have very cold or even numb extremities, will feel foggy headed or dissociated, can appear lethargic or fatigued, may have great difficulty motivating, and again may manifest an upset stomach as well as a susceptibility to colds and other bugs. High functioning freeze looks like going through the motions but not producing much, as well as chronic procrastination and avoidance. You can recognise a freeze in students if they consistently overpromise and underdeliver, avoid meetings, produce excellent work but extremely slowly, and appear self-critical and uncertain. Unlike hyperarousal which can be praised in academia, hypoarousal is often accompanied by shame and self-doubt and students stuck in a freeze can experience more distress because they feel they are failing to pass in the academy. A hypoaroused student should be referred to the counselling service for additional support, and may benefit from mentoring as well as working on smaller blocks of work to build their confidence.

Fawn – fawning is a state in which people are focused on pleasing and appeasing others in order to make themselves safe. It is a mixed nervous system state with a lot of hyperarousal generating energy and activity but a level of hypoarousal causing dissociation from the self. In fawn, students will be particularly adept at performing the role of a high-flying PhD candidate but there will be discrepancies. You can notice evidence of anxiety, as well as lack of confidence, procrastination, and taking on too many extracurricular activities. Students in a fawn state are highly aware of the power imbalance described above and feel unsafe within it, so addressing this aspect of the supervisory relationship is key. These students need to be reassured and encouraged in their own intellectual agency and research capacity, and discouraged from taking on too much. Students who are often in a fawn state are at particular risk of burnout because the dissociation makes them less likely to notice signs they are running on empty.

Finally…

Look after your own mental health

Being around emotionally distressed students is also an emotionally distressing experience for supervisors. This is true whether you are naturally empathetic or not – the effort of being in the presence of someone who is struggling is real, and if you are also feeling overwhelmed then being the first port of call for someone in pain can be an additional piece of emotional labour. It is vitally important, then, that supervisors take care of their own mental health as part of basic functioning in this role. You have a lot going on, and need to be conscious and aware of how the challenges of academia are affecting you.

You can perhaps use some of the information given above to consider your own nervous system state before going into supervisions, and how this might be affecting your perception of your students. For example, if you are actually in quite a hyperaroused state, rushing between teaching and meetings, with a backlog of emails, an unwritten funding application, and a problem with staffing a course to resolve, and you then start to find a PhD candidate extremely irritating and needy – the chances are this is not a problem in the student but a reaction in your own nervous system to being overwhelmed. If you were feeling calmer, then the student’s questions and uncertainties would probably be relatively straightforward to resolve. By contrast, if a student appears to be consistently struggling, there is a much higher likelihood that they are finding something in the supervision upsetting, as far more rests on the relationship for them than it does for you. Taking care of your own mental health and accessing support yourself is therefore the most foundational way in which you can work toward being a psychologically safe supervisor.

How have you found yourself responding to this article as you read? Do you resonate with anything, or find it helpful? Do you think there are things I haven’t considered? Do leave a comment and let me know, or get in touch if I can support you further in any way. If you would like to discuss hiring me to run a training in your department, I would be happy to hear from you.