Passion, precariousness, overwork, and mental health: an inquiry into academics’ lived experiences

In the contemporary labor landscape, we are all exhausted, overwhelmed, underpaid, and frustrated by the impossibility of reconciling work and private life. This holds true also within the academic world, which has increasingly adopted a corporate model in the past two decades, characterized by competitiveness, productivity, and individualism. Alongside teaching and student supervision, administrative burdens have become more substantial, as have the pressures for innovative research, high-impact publications, and funding requests, highlighting an idealized academic figure rooted in the norm of global hegemonic masculinity: highly productive, career-oriented, mobile, and free from primary caregiving responsibilities. How sustainable is this idealized image? Numerous studies, in Europe and worldwide, are addressing the high rates of psychological impairments among academics, such as anxiety, stress, and depression. These rates result even more prevalent among academics with fixed-term contracts, compounded by intersections of socio-economic status, gender, class, race, among others. It is evidenced that neoliberal paradigms have found fertile ground in academia, where structural issues are internalized as personal failures, leading to feelings of guilt, out-of-placeness, and individualized shame. Yet, little is known about Italian early-career researchers’ mental health and well-being, their critical awareness concerning these dynamics, the extent of their discontent and its internalization, as well as their coping strategies. Through a series of open-ended questions, we explored the experiences of approximately 400 academics (Ph.D. students, post-doc researcher, and fixed-term researchers) to gain insight into their perceptions of daily life within academia, their experiences, and their strategies for resilience and resistance.