"I have always been an advocate for inclusion in higher education since I always felt 'different' to everyone else. I never struggled academically, so I guess my disabilities just flew under the radar. I was diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia in the second year of my PhD. I was nervous about how people would interpret my diagnosis. Most of the reactions that I had were dismissive, 'aren't we all a bit dyslexic really?' 'there's no way you're dyslexic, you don't struggle'. Thankfully, my academic supervisor was incredibly supportive and has largely let me do my own thing. Being aware of my disabilities allows me to better manage my workload. It's one of the ways I monitor my stress levels. I am open about my disabilities to try and create a greater awareness of neurodiversity. Dyspraxia and dyslexia are not just coordination and reading difficulties; they open up a whole different way of thinking that can be beneficial in many aspects of life."
- Graduate/Professional Student in Chemistry from the United Kingdom
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"I was removed from being a co-first author on a paper when I was dealing with a new diagnosis. I was told that I was not as eager or as capable of completing the paper as my colleague, and that my colleague was able to see it through to the end and that perseverance is what you need in a first author (a quality that I did not have for this project). All of my previous work seemed to be irrelevant. I wanted to come up with a compromise where I could do more of the analysis and writing, since the data collection had already finished, but I was dismissed and they had already made up their mind. I felt like I was being punished for being ill. Felt like I was being told that I was not allowed to grieve and that my experience was irrelevant and that I should have powered through and been just as on top of it as I had always been. It had only been 1.5 months. How could my previous 6 months suddenly not be as worth as 1.5 months. It was devastating."
- Graduate/Professional Student in Biology from Canada
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"I am a PhD student with Asperger's. During a Diversity Roundtable meeting, while we were discussing discrimination and inclusion, the grad student representative made a joke about schizophrenia. All the board members laughed, and continued as if nothing had happened. After we had just discussed ableism and the lack of accommodations for disabled colleagues."
- Graduate/Professional Student in North American Studies from Germany
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"Having to ask numerous times for reasonable adjustments to be put into place! Being pulled aside in a corridor and questioned about why I was using the mental health mentor, did I not know it costs the department money, and also did I not know how much they had spent on my adjustments already. Saying well you’re probably upset because you have anxiety (when I made a complaint about a health and safety incident). It’s not such a big deal."
- Graduate/Professional Student in Regenerative Medicine from the United Kingdom
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"I come from a culture in which mental health is considered not real. I only got diagnosed in my undergrad, and only reached peak treatment/accommodations in grad. In my undergrad, I experienced difficulty explaining severe depressive episodes triggered by my CAEBV. I would explain shyly how I didn't turn in an assignment because of mental health difficulties and they would respond "Well, you should've attended lecture daily and talked to me. Everyone has some stress in their lives". I would muster a sorry, thinking about how difficult it had been to get out of bed and shower the last week while pushing self-harm thoughts out of my head and hating myself for not attending class. I would accept a 0 for the assignment, letting myself feel the failure. Knowing the 0s were there, my performance in the class would snowball downwards. I would see the Cs on my transcript knowing they had been caused by the missing assignments and would feel the pain of my failures. I almost didn't get into grad school. Luckily I did, and I got my treatment just right and now I feel good enough to advocate for myself. I missed a few assignments in grad school too, but I was able to talk to the professors earnestly and help them understand and made the assignments up and ended getting straight As in my grad degree. I am grateful to the kindness of those professors, but I will never forget though the look of disapproval and even disgust those professors in my undergrad gave me though as I reached out to them for help. I felt like I didn't belong."
- Professional in Computer Science in the United States of America
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"In both community college and university I found myself relying on the kindness of my professors to be accommodating about my chronic illness. In short, the disability resource centers were "unable to provide the requested accommodations." Some of these would have been: the ability to postpone or retake an exam if I had to go home in the middle of it due to sudden onset of severe pain; to have notes or powerpoints sent to me (either by the professor or a peer) on the days when I literally could not get out of bed. So I was forced to tell my professors about my illness, sometimes in significant detail if they asked for more information to "prove" my case, and pray to God that they would understand or, at the very least, believe me.""
- Professional in Literature in the United States of America
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"I spent most of my undergrad career on the liver transplant waiting list, where I wasn't able to leave a specific radius around my transplant center. My dream was to become a middle school Spanish teacher, but I was told that I needed to study abroad in order to get my teaching license. In bringing this up to the Education department I was told to talk to the Spanish department. In bringing this up to the Spanish department I was told to talk to the Education department. Many claimed that they'd never had a student be in a situation where they couldn't study abroad and I never received any help. Due to this I had to drop my dream of Spanish education and instead found a different path late in my college career."
- Professional in Student Life in the United States of America
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"My first time meeting with my PI to see if his lab would be a good fit, he noticed me jerking and asked if I was nervous. I said yes, but also explained that I had chronic motor tic disorder, which causes involuntary movements. He told me there was no reason to be nervous and moved on. From then, my tics still happened sometimes but were largely ignored, and I thought he might have forgotten about them. It was sometimes frustrating because I didn't feel like I could ask anyone to help if I felt I couldn't do something, but no one drew attention to it, which actually helps make it happen less. About a year later when a new grad student was starting in the lab, she noticed me ticcing and asked about it. I explained, and my PI commented that my tics had seemed a lot better recently, which was the first time since my initial meeting with him the year before that he'd even mentioned my disability (we'd never even worked out any necessary accommodations for lab). I had started different medication recently and mentioned that it was working well but had the unfortunate side effect of making me have no appetite, which he made comments about as something he wished he could have. I'd been struggling for months to eat enough because of my new medication that I needed to keep my tics under control, and then in the lab, in front of another student, he made it sound like it was a nice thing to have to deal with. I really enjoyed that lab and working with that professor, but the way my disability was handled really worries me when I thought about it sometimes—I usually tried not to, even though it impacted things fairly frequently."
- Undergraduate Student in Biochemistry in the United States of America
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"I have a lot of hard stories, but I want to celebrate just a minute. My self advocacy has always been soft. I slip through the cracks: too sick to be healthy with lots of strategies to cover the hard places. Compensatory mutations, if you will. Our lab group made a move to a new building about 10 months ago. Before that, Id always worked in a lab with its own mini-fridge or floor fridge. Refrigerated meds just get a "don't throw away" note and maybe you pull them out semi annually when they decontaminate the fridge. We moved to a place where the building had communal fridges with were cleaned weekly. ADHD + refrigerated medication + Weekly cleaning = lost drugs. My other option was the lab fridge with chemicals, samples, and other potential contaminants. I asked my boss for help. Two weeks later, he came back with a mini fridge for my drugs. He got special permission to have it. And when I thanked him, he just went, Of course its my job. Accommodations like a fridge for medical shouldn't be radical. Accommodations like stools in the lab shouldn't be radical. Accommodations like interpreters and alt text shouldn't be radical. They're part of our supervisor's jobs. We and they need to remember that."
- Postdoctoral Fellow in Microbiology in Scandanavia
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"According to the ADA, I can be classified as having a disability. I have ADHD (undiagnosed until I hit grad school), major depressive disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder (which can manifest as panic attacks if I don't strictly monitor my mood). I am happy to tell people about my psychiatric disorders, but I rarely refer to them as disabilities. Intellectually I know I have a disability, but because they're invisible and under control, I can't get over the feeling that I'm being fake. And yet, they've played a huge role in my journey through higher ed. In my first grad school experience, I always felt like I was doing something wrong when I couldn't sit down and work quietly at a task for 6 hours, the way everyone else could. When I tried to explain my struggles, my advisor said I just needed to "build up" my tolerance and ability to focus - because if I just tried hard enough, I could learn to ignore the way my brain darted everywhere, and my body felt like it constantly needed to move. At the time, I believed him. It's not like *I* knew what was going on, and since no one else had difficulty, I thought the problem had to be with me and my willpower. I eventually left that program after I started having panic attacks. For a long time, I took it as a sign that I just couldn't handle the rigors and stress of being in academia. I tried out a couple of different jobs and finally realized that I needed to go back and get my PhD. At the time I told myself it was so I could be eligible for the sorts of jobs I wanted, but looking back now I think it was more so I could prove to myself that I really had what it took to stick with and FINISH a PhD. Every step of the way (from application to acceptance into the program and up through my third year), I doubted myself; it felt like I was just waiting until I somehow failed again. I eventually ended up in a psychiatric genetics lab studying the genetic basis of mood disorders. It's only been recently that I can even admit to myself that maybe I CAN do this, and maybe *I* wasn't the problem the first time. I still have to constantly fight to stay on task and centered, but having an advisor who gets that my ADHD and depression behaviors aren't the result of failing willpower has been an enormous help. But my experiences have definitely left scars in my self-image."
- Graduate/Professional Student in Epidemiology/Genetics in the United States of America
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"One key moment that stood out to me was undertaking the PG Cert course in teaching and learning for higher education upon starting a new academic job. The course teacher wanted the class to all stand and participate in certain activities, but having a severe spinal problem necessitating I walk with a stick I did not wish to do these. She got the rest of the group to stand up and begin these tasks, but as they commenced she asked the class member who was trying to organise everyone "is everyone included who wants to be?" The student (lecturer) she was asking this replied in the affirmative, since everyone was participating other than myself, and I very visibly had my walking stick on the table in front of me. The course teacher then looked over at me and I felt forced to clarify "I'm fine just watching", at which point she flatly ignored this and repeated "is everyone included who wants to be?". When again we clarified they were, she then insisted "make sure everyone is included", and I felt essentially bullied into standing up and limping over to where the class was doing the exercise. This woman was supposedly the one teaching us about inclusive practice, yet refused to accept someone she could see blatantly walks with a stick owing to severe spinal problems might not want to be standing up for activities in a session. Needless to say, I lost all confidence in the course at that point - what value could it confer if the supposed 'expert' in inclusive practice was so opposed to making allowances for differently-abled students?"
- Postdoctoral Fellow in the United Kingdom
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"I have a chronic and incurable debilitating but fluctuating illness I took a couple of leave of absence periods from my PhD I then tried to take another and provided the required medical evidence and a letter from my doctor to say I was not well enough to be studying at that time. The non-medically trained academics on the University Special Cases Committee who had never met me informed me that they sympathised with my situation and would normally grant a leave of absence in these circumstances but I had reached the '2 year max. cap' on sick leave for PhD students and although my actual doctor specifically said otherwise the committee didn't feel that I was sick 'enough' for them to make an exception to the cap for me. They then told me to ask my doctor to provide a 'fit for study' letter for my file ASAP so that I could continue with my course."
- Graduate/Professional Student in the United Kingdom
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