Academia is too much for my neurodivergent brain. I’m leaving

In recent years, Twitter has been awash with researchers and lecturers announcing their departure from academia. Earlier this year, it was my turn.

For 13 years, I was part of what my employer called its “family” (a dazzling red flag), and therefore part of an academic system riddled with inequity. It is like a never-ending treadmill, with the speed and incline increasing as you climb the seniority ladder. Rather than focusing on the unlikely professorship available to the rare few able to outrun the treadmill, it is more forgiving to concentrate on realistic, short-term successes, such as grant awards, journal publications and conference presentations. Yet you quickly forget your last success as you move on instantly to the next application, the next project, the next piece of writing. It’s relentless.

My academic treadmill always ran at a speed slightly faster than I could comfortably maintain. I was employed on fixed-term contracts of varying lengths for a period of five years, meaning that while I was working on the short-term goals associated with the research projects I was being paid to conduct, I also needed to find money to fund the next project to ensure I could pay my bills. It’s not efficient or enjoyable to work this way, and it had a detrimental impact on my ability to do my job well. I felt rootless, and my days were underpinned by low-level anxiety about what I’d do when my contract ended. I had no head space for creative ideas and interdisciplinary concepts. If I’d tried a star jump, I knew I’d just fall off the treadmill entirely.

In February 2020 I was signed off work due to stress. I was burnt out. My anxiety had matured into internal panic that left me unable to put one foot in front of the other. I slept more than I ever thought possible; at one point, I sat on the floor of my kitchen to play with my dog and woke up four hours later with my head resting in his bed. Initially, I was frustrated with myself for needing a break, but the focus of my frustration gradually shifted to academia’s unsustainable culture of more.

My line manager was understanding. He encouraged me to take the time I needed to rest and decompress. This meant that when I returned to work, I felt ready to step back on to the treadmill. I secured grants, I published papers, I presented at conferences, I even received an award for my research.

Despite my outward success, however, something didn’t feel right. I wasn’t desperately unhappy, but I had lost my spark. I swayed between frustration, hope and self-doubt, a cycle that repeated through 18 months of ruminating on what to do next. I would have probably stayed in academia for another few years if I hadn’t been shocked out of the cycle when I realised that I had ADHD.

Having the framework of ADHD to work from was comforting: it gave me a reason for my struggles and reassured me that I was not a failure. My ADHD brain is an “all or nothing” thinker, making it almost impossible for me to simply jog on the treadmill. I was either running until my lungs burned, or exhausted and unable to string sentences together. For me, staying in academic research would likely have meant living in a cycle of burnout, exhaustion and indifference.

I thought deeply about what success meant to me and what I wanted to achieve with my research, and I concluded that the relentless search for grants, publications and conference presentations did not give me the warm, fuzzy feeling of a life well lived. I want my research to fuel change and make a positive impact on the world, and I do not want to suffer in the process.

I deserve the opportunity to succeed on my own terms, and to do that I need job security. The managers at my new employer, a creative health engagement agency, have already demonstrated that they value me, and my new role will allow me to do a star jump every so often, while giving me the space to learn to cartwheel.

I realise that I am lucky. There must be hundreds of researchers originating from overseas who would also like to step off the never-ending academic treadmill but who cannot because their ability to live and work in the UK is tied to their university-sponsored visas – and to a system built on inequity.

Now that I’ve made the decision to leave, I know I stayed in academia too long. Was I ever cut out for it? Yes and no. In some ways my ADHD is a strength: I bring creativity, passion, empathy and flexibility. Unfortunately, the hyper-focus and sense of fairness that fuels many of the positives of ADHD also meant that I worried more about my lack of stability than my neurotypical colleagues did. Of course, people with ADHD are all different, but if academia is to retain their talents, it needs, in my opinion, to offer job stability, fair rewards (there’s a reason why staff are on strike) and time to allow our creativity and passion to bloom.

Until then, the academy will remain, at best, a difficult place for neurodivergent researchers; at worst, it’s dangerous.

Heidi Green was a research fellow in the Health Services Research Unit at the University of Aberdeen.