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Alex Mendelsohn's avatar

Thank you very much Kathleen, I was absolutely exhausted by the end of writing it! I wanted to show what a high standard of patient-led psychiatric communication could look like. I hope I have achieved it.

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Kathleen Weber's avatar

As a person who has survived the rigors of getting a PhD. you certainly have accomplished that. I have been a psych patient myself for decades, with a form of multiple personality disorder, and I one day plan to write my experiences, but I will not undertake the grueling task pf placing them in an academic context.

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Alex Mendelsohn's avatar

Thank you very much Kathleen! And I can definitely relate to the survival of rogors of PhD (congrats on surviving btw!). Out of curiosity, what was the bit you found the most, I'm not going to say painful, but dragging - like going on and on with seemingly no end in sight? I think that is a common experience I've noticed amongst peers.

I've found it challenging to communicate what it is like to really dig deep into a subject. So at undergrad I remember thinking "wow, I know so much about physics", then at masters thinking "wow, I now know so much more about x-ray diffraction" (my masters project). And then you get to a PhD where you spend the entire first year just learning, no serious project work at all, and I remember thinking "wow, I know so little".

So I am very happy to bump into someone who understands just how difficult it is to take two already difficult things, researching a subject, and finding words that coherently express one's story, and then putting them together in a way that makes sense.

Thank you for sharing that you've experienced a long time being a psych patient. If you have a story to write, I can imagine there were some very, the only word I can think of, eventful periods. I would love to read your story one day.

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Kathleen Weber's avatar

By far, the most painful part of my PhD was writing my dissertation. Part of my psychopathology is writer's block. And humanities dissertations tend to be hundreds of pages long. In the sciences, you do an experiment and then you describe it. I've heard of science PhD's where the dissertation was less than 100 pages long.

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Alex Mendelsohn's avatar

I have significant empathy for your experience in the humanities, writing 100s of pages. Especially with writer's block! As someone who... erm... wrote a 96 page thesis (and found that a drag), I have no ground to stand on!

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