PostDoc Discussion Forum

Hi all,
recently I have reached the border of my mental health. I started getting professional help and it is slowly becoming better. However, I am now thinking about whether I want to move on further into this process or if it costs me too much. I am now in my third year. I am doing research in clinics on stroke patients and it takes around one and a half weeks to conduct a study with one patient. I have managed to get in touch and get permits from a few Institutions to run the research there. However, one of them is now closed and the others do not provide me with as many patients as I need to finish conducting the study within a year. Other institutions that may have such patients are far away 50km (and more) away again on a larger scale. I do not have the grant to make someone do it for me. After I will collect my data, I will have to analyze and it will be another struggle as I do not know how to do that yet. My supervisors are hard to reach and usually, I can talk about the project itself and there is from my city. I could go there by car, but it will be super expensive as I would need to go there 5days/week. My Uni will not cover these expenses (even if I would use public transport), nor the expenses of accommodation. Moreover, traveling there will take me a lot of time, so I will have to reorganize my life. I have the feeling that I was reorganizing it and that it is basically subordinate to the PhD process I can't imagine doing it once no time left for concerns. What would you do? How would you find that you have reached the wall and that the project you have created is just impossible to fulfill? Do you have any ideas on how I can make realizing this project easier for me? Looking forward to your answers!

Other thoughts:

- in terms of being able to finish: just from my own experience, ask yourself if you are being a perfectionist relative to what you actually need to finish. This is very difficult to gauge when you are in the middle of it. I swore blind i wasnt and now i realise i could have done less and passed. This is the issue of having absent supervisors. Check papers in your field. What kind of sample size do they have? Check what you actually need to finish the thesis. Do you need to publish anything? If not, will a less then perfect sample size be enough? Could your study be supplemented by data that you could obtain via existing databases or by remote data collection? Here it would be helpful to know what type of study you are doing

- work/life balance: a phd requires a certain about of sacrifice, i think its not always possible to maintain a great work/life balance, but i personally feel this is only sustainable in short bursts. For example, for a few weeks of fieldwork, perhaps you have to move around and live in hostels and your life has to be about fieldwork for that period, although obviously with time off regularly. I have heard it said far too often that you cannot have a healthy social life and interests and responsabilities outside of the PhD, because a phd needs all your time: this is a false economy because burn-out is the result. You should not have to trade your mental and physical health for your PhD. Your situation, where phd students are thrown impossible hobby projects by supervisors and then more or less abandoned, is common. It is valient and understandable to want to make the best of it, but bear in mind your supervisors are unlikely to be supportive, and you can end up in a situation where they blame you for anything wrong with the project, rather then recognising the Herculean effort you have put in achieving the near-impossible. Given this, I personally would also evaluate your options for doing a PhD elsewhere: if you have learnt skills and have your own ideas and are doing everything by yourself, perhaps it would be less stressful to work and do your thesis part-time self-funding (you might even finish faster). I dont know where you are based but there are good universities that are not expensive to register with globally for doctoral studies (ie, not in the USA). Bear in mind this might mean abandoning your current data since your university might have interlectual property rights on it and you do not want to mess with that, you are supposed to be looking after your mental health here.

Long reply, but these are some of the things that occur to me as someone in a similar situation to yours but a few years ahead having decided to stick it.