The pressures of academia helped fuel over a decade of addiction for me. How many of our colleagues suffer in silence?

Guest Post by Dr. Bryan Pitts

 

My name is Bryan, and I’m a drug addict. It’s one thing to say this in a 12-step meeting, quite another to admit it in a public academic forum. Graduate school drilled into me that any imperfection, any cracks in the curated persona the academy demands we create, would lead to dire consequences. If a picture on Facebook of me holding a beer could wreck my career (as a faculty member once told me it might), then what might happen if I were to go public with my addiction to stimulants?

But there came a point when the shame and solitude of addiction became a greater danger to me than the hypothetical consequences of disclosure. Over the last two or three years, I have shared my struggle with a variety of friends and colleagues, and I recently presented an autoethnographic conference paper on my recovery journey. I have often wondered how many of my fellow academics suffer in silence through alcoholism, drug addiction, or addictions to sex, gambling, and other behaviors, their unhealthy coping mechanisms fueled by the pressures of our profession. It is my hope that this piece can show those people that they aren’t alone and, who knows, maybe start a conversation about the ways the culture of the academy can push us toward addiction.

Like lots of graduate students, I drank my way through grad school. Starting with the recruitment weekend for students accepted to my doctoral program, pretty much every social event (and most professional ones) featured alcohol, often for free. I drank plenty on my own too; when I finished my dissertation, I half-joked that I had probably written some of it at every bar in North Carolina’s Research Triangle. There was just so much pressure. Pressure to read 2,000 pages a week. Pressure to get through prelims. Pressure to get a dissertation research grant. Pressure to publish. Pressure to defend. And most crushingly of all: pressure to get a tenure-track job. Alcohol helped relieve the pressure, at least temporarily, particularly for a poorly emotionally-regulated person like me.

I had been raised in a fundamentalist Christian setting where the pressure to be perfect was similarly unrelenting. The list of things that would doom me to hell was endless, and since God’s tests had no rubric, I could never be sure I had done enough (or avoided sin well enough) to pass. Really, how different is this from the academy, where we are endlessly subjected to high-stakes evaluations with vague criteria? Admission committees, prelim committees, dissertation committees, selection committees, peer reviewers, search committees, tenure committees. The pressure to keep countless fickle constituencies happy multiplied the pressure on me to perform at every stage.

During the five years between finishing my Ph.D. and finally landing an administrative job at a university, things came to a head. On top of the pressure I felt to perform highly and please too many people, my very identity and sense of self-worth had become tied to one specific outcome: getting a tenure-track job. Through seven years of doctoral work, at no point did anyone – faculty or fellow graduate students – discuss any other career track as a valid option. What I absorbed unconsciously was that winners got tenure-track jobs (at R1 universities, no less), and those who fell short would be left to pick up the pieces of their lives as best they could. As the rejections on the job market mounted, my anxiety and shame mounted accordingly. And the need to escape grew.

Prior to defending my dissertation, I had only dabbled in drugs. I did ecstasy and cocaine once each, and I had tried crystal meth as well. But as the rejections on the job market mounted, and the sense of helplessness and inadequacy grew, I found I wanted an escape more complete than alcohol could provide. Stimulants gave that to me. My drug use was enabled by a fourth characteristic of the academy: unsupervised work and a flexible schedule. During a three-year postdoc, I often found myself only teaching on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which left me to my own devices between Thursday night and Tuesday morning. I found that I could go to a nearby major city, get high for the weekend, and (usually) make it back in time to teach (somewhat) coherently on Tuesday.

All these drivers of addiction – overwhelming work requirements, the need to keep so many groups of people happy, our tendency to link our self-worth to the achievement of success as the academy defines it, and flexible work schedules – are the fruits of a system of higher education that ruthlessly exploits graduate students, staff, contingent faculty, and even the tenured while simultaneously mystifying our oppressive working conditions. “We don’t do it for the money!” “It’s a craft, not a career.” “Even though I am working 60-hour weeks, the flexibility makes up for it!” The system that exploits us also places unattainable expectations upon us, and then blames us when we don’t fulfill them. And we who often style ourselves as politically progressive wind up internalizing the messages of a savage capitalist system that shamelessly deploys meritocratic myths. This creates a perfect storm for substance abuse and other unhealthy coping mechanisms, especially for those who, like me, are predisposed toward it as a result of genetics, upbringing, or both. The results can be devastating. While I may have held things together on the outside, I only avoided burning my life to the ground by dumb luck. As it was, my addiction still came pretty close to killing me, whether via overdose (I wound up in the hospital twice) or as a result of a series of worsening psychotic breaks.

I have wrestled with how open to be about my drug use; future prospective employers who stumble across this piece might well hesitate to hire a recovering addict. But I have discovered that the more open I am with my struggles, the more the shame that kept me mired in addiction continues to dissipate. In addition, as a cisgender white man working with (hopefully) progressive colleagues in California, the most liberal state in the country – and whose job security does not depend upon getting tenure – I am probably safer doing this than many scholars with similar struggles.

I began to find a path toward healing as I freed myself from some of the pressures of the academy by taking a non-tenure track faculty job and eventually a staff position. With research not part of the job description, there is no longer pressure to publish. (However, I have published far more, including my first book, after being told I no longer had to). Without the pressure of a tenure review looming, I have time for hobbies like vegetable gardening and cycling. My 9-5 schedule, including summers, has given my life more structure. True, some of the faculty members with whom I have worked have treated me more like a secretary than a fellow scholar, but even that has led me to an invaluable insight: academia is what I do, not who I am. So what if a faculty member wants me to address emails to “Dear Faculty” instead of “Dear Colleagues”? (Yes, this really happened.) I’m leaving at 5:00 either way, and I will spend my evening reading fiction or writing a media article in my area of expertise, Brazilian politics. Let them enjoy jumping through academic hoops to make others happy; I am finally free to live my life free of all those crushing expectations.

The road to recovery has been slow, filled with false starts and setbacks. My career reset is only part of the story; just as important have been years of therapy, a treatment with the psychedelic drug ibogaine, outpatient and residential treatment programs, and mutual help programs such as 12-step fellowships and Recovery Dharma (a Buddhist-informed approach to recovery). But the overall trajectory has been steadily upward. Through all of these, I have learned how to base my identity and self-worth on things other than academic success. In the process, I have gone from barely being able to stay sober for a week to putting together over six months. In so small measure I credit the success I have had freeing myself of the unhealthy, even toxic, expectations that an academic career imposes on us all.

I have found a few other scholars along the way who have shared their struggles with substance abuse with me, and some of us have found ourselves wondering how we academics in recovery (or interested in it) might support each other. If you would like to participate in this conversation, please feel free to contact me at mbpittsjr@gmail.com, and we can discuss the best way to connect.

(Note from Karen:  I warmly welcome guest posts about addiction in academia, as well as mental illness, neurodivergency, physical illness, disability, and related topics. I have had a commitment to publishing this content since 2011, and you can see them in the blog category, Mental Health and Academia. I would like to re-energize this area of content on the blog. Please email proposals or drafts to gettenure@gmail.com.)