When we recognise an injustice or flaw in our academic environment, it can be hard to know how to react. Am I the only one who sees it, or do my colleagues agree with me? Do I have any power to challenge the system? How can I find the time or energy to be an activist as well as a researcher?
In 2021, a group of graduate students at the University of Toronto decided to find ways to address the ongoing mental health crisis in academia*. They put their time, energy and organisational powers together to found the international online conference Mental health - INternationally Delivering Support (MINDS). This conference addressed a variety of topics that impact our mental well-being, including mental illness, student-supervisor relationships, financial instability, the Covid-19 pandemic, and diversity and inclusion. By providing a platform to discuss these important (but often taboo) topics and focussing on people’s lived experiences, they not only shared information about mental health in academia but also started an online community of researchers who could provide mutual support. Research shows that community building can be one of the most effective ways to prevent or alleviate certain mental health conditions*.
The first MINDS conference took place in September 2021. In order to serve people across the globe, it took place virtually over 24 hours to allow people to drop in as their schedule and time zone allowed. The second conference took place in April-May 2024 and was split into two half-day sessions. Both editions were grassroots initiatives, organised by a passionate team of volunteer students and early-career researchers in their precious spare time.
We sat down with MINDS founders Alaa Alsaafin, Alison Jee and Aleksandra (Sasha) Marakhovskaia to talk about their experience in running such an ambitious and successful initiative.
The MINDS conference founders (left to right): Dr. Alaa Alsaafin, Dr. Alison Jee, Dr. Alex Malinowski, Dr. Aleksandra (Sasha) Marakhovskaia
Could you tell me about where you all were, in your lives or careers, when you came up with the idea of hosting a conference on mental health in academia?
Alaa: I was in my 4th year of my PhD in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Toronto, with Sasha and Alison. It was during the middle of the pandemic, when many people were suffering from loneliness and depression. In my graduate department, we set up virtual sessions to chat and exercise, which helped us stay in touch with each other during lockdown and stay sane! .
Sasha: In the spring of 2021, I was also in the middle of my PhD and I couldn’t see it coming to an end any time soon. There was also this gap that I felt for community building. I wanted to connect with people! So around that time we started thinking about something like hosting a conference.
Alison: I was also just really frustrated with where my thesis was, it wasn’t progressing. It was a frustrating time. But we were all in a student association at the time and I think Sasha was already trying to pull together some mental health workshops for the department, even before the pandemic hit. Then she made those happen once we were all working over Zoom, and that’s how things started rolling. Sasha and Alaa are such go-getters, so they just said, “an international conference, let’s do it!”, and then MINDS happened!
So you were already involved in student activism and mental health advocacy. But did the online environment of the pandemic help or motivate you to organise something on this big, international scale?
Sasha: Yeah, we had already dipped our toes into smaller-scale departmental initiatives, and we were all part of the student association, and it felt like people were interested [in discussing mental health]. I think universities, and the University of Toronto specifically, were putting a lot of money and resources into trying to boost student activities, and we came across this grant targeting international students [the Student Engagement Award]. I thought “why just target international students at U of T when we can have a bigger audience?”. I guess having Zoom just pushed us, helped to make our idea a little more ambitious.
I think that at that time a lot of people found themselves in a dark, confusing place. You work all your life, you’re going somewhere, and then the whole world just stops and you start questioning things. But we wanted to find the silver lining. We thought we should use our skills as academics to improve our own environment, Reframing the famous quotation from Mahatma Gandhi “If you want to change the world, start with yourself.”
I know a lot of people want to talk about mental health or take part in initiatives like this but don’t know how to get started. How did you take MINDS from idea to reality?
Alaa: I remember being a kid and watching this cartoon about a soccer player who went all around the world getting the best players to join his team. I honestly feel like I really lucked out with Sasha, Alison, and Alex, because they were this super team. Everybody came with their unique but overlapping skill sets and it all fit very nicely together. It helped that we had a lot of time during the pandemic. But they were also very keen and we worked really well together, and we all had the same mission and hopes for MINDS. We also brought good organisational skills: we had timelines of what we wanted to achieve, we knew who we wanted to reach out to, and how we wanted to go about it. Everybody really came together and lifted it up!
Sasha: I think Alaa and Alison were exceptional at planning and streamlining the whole process, while I was coming up with ideas. I was just this boom of unrestricted brainstorms!
Alison: The visionary!
Sasha: But I also felt like I needed guidance, so I really appreciated the whole team. Another big part of the process was reaching out to Dragonfly Mental Health. They already had huge resources, a team, a lot of volunteers, and outreach experience. They helped us connect with a lot of people and provided us with a lot of resources. I felt like we were riding their wave.
We also connected with academics in other places. Twitter was, at that point, a place where a lot of academics wanted to talk about mental health, and I feel like that environment helped to amplify our mission.
I remember there was a huge variety of speakers, from different places, backgrounds and career stages. How did you scout all these people from around the world?
Alaa: It was Sasha! She was so good at searching for people on Twitter, it was phenomenal. She identified people based on their platform, seeing how much of an advocate they were and what type of advocacy they did. Then it was just a matter of sending them and email asking “can you please join us?”
Sasha: I feel like people were very open, plus during the pandemic people were on Twitter all the time and I was also on Twitter all the time! So I would just cold-message people and ask if they were interested. Because our team shared a clear mission, for the first time in my life, I had no social anxiety!
Most conference organisers have a year or more to plan their event. MINDS 2021 was put together in a matter of 3 or 4 months. How did it feel, putting everything together so fast and then ending with the marathon 24-hour conference?
Alison: It did feel like a blur. Looking back on it, I’m not sure what happened or how. Sometimes when you’re planning something really big, it can be easy to get bogged down in a lot of administrative bureaucracy. But we just didn’t have time for that; we just couldn’t do anything that was not productive. So in some sense, the time limitation was a bit useful. But it was definitely intense, I would never tell anyone to do that. Give yourself more time. Also, don’t plan a conference that lasts 24 hours at a time!
As well as the conference format, did the content change a lot between 2021 and 2024?
Sasha: The first conference definitely had a huge emphasis on the pandemic. I think this was also the peak time for mental health discussions in the world, not only in academia, but in general. A lot of people had topics like burnout on their minds and we gathered that energy in the first iteration of MINDS. We also covered a really wide range of topics. It was the first conference, and we were really trying to pack it with things people would be interested in and include a wide range of personal perspectives and experiences. For the second iteration, we scaled down, as we didn’t want to cover as many topics. We wanted to focus on topics that really resonate in 2024 because the mental health discussion had evolved over time.
You all put so much of your time and effort into this project, what impact has it had on your lives? (Aside from developing excellent project management skills, of course!)
Alaa: Especially in the first iteration, I appreciated that some of the topics we talked about were… the ones we might consider as “spicy”. Let’s talk about power imbalance, let’s talk about power abuse. These are usually topics that usually only get talked about on a smaller scale or with a heavy filter because we want to make sure we’re not ticking anyone off. Despite it being during a 24-hour conference, discussing these topics and hearing people’s lived experiences woke me up! It shook me to my core to hear people’s experiences and realise “oh my god, this really happened to someone”. It fortified why we did MINDS - this is why we need to talk about mental health, we need to bring it to the surface.
The default setting of some grad students is to be depressed or anxious - let’s not live like that. All these conversations helped me a lot, especially during that quite dark time. Getting together as a community was really empowering. We realised that everybody wanted to talk about mental health and they just needed that platform.
Sasha: For me, it was also a life-changing experience because at that point in my PhD, nothing was working. I felt like no matter what I did, nothing worked out. So even though sometimes organising this conference was really tough, and I felt guilty for putting pressure on the team, I really felt proud that we managed to do it. I think it gave me the inspiration that I could actually finish my PhD! There had been difficult moments throughout my journey, when I doubted myself and I didn’t know if the problem was me or my environment. But then through MINDS, I learned not to just blame myself for my lack of skills because our whole academic environment isn’t working. After the conference, I found myself in some dark times, but the fact that this happened, that we have this community, the way we all bonded, that helped me personally if not professionally. It is a part of me at this point, I will carry it with me for the rest of my life.
Alison: Doing these conferences definitely helped me get through my PhD as well. It provided a network of people that I could talk to and work things through with. It gave me some perspective, as it helped me to get out of my own head and my own problems. It was grounding. The conference really validated itself because as we heard more and more people tell their stories, we realised that we definitely need to have these conversations. And it’s rewarding to hear that people are getting the platform they need to discuss things that are traditionally not talked about in academic settings.
The MINDS team are grateful to the University of Toronto (Student Engagement Award) for financial support and to Dragonfly Mental Health for providing support and expertise.
Videos of selected talks from both editions of the MINDS conference are available on YouTube (link).
A wide selection of talks from both MINDS conferences is available on the MINDS YouTube channel. Not sure where to start? Here are some recommendations from the founders themselves! Click on a thumbnail to watch the video on YouTube.
You can also follow MINDS on Instagram, LinkedIn and X or visit visit https://www.mindsinacademia.com/ to get updates about future events such as online seminars.
*For information on the state of mental health in academia as well as a general primer on some common mental health conditions and their prevention and treatment, we recommend the talk A Scientist's Primer on Mental Health and references contained therein.
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