Welcome to Scholar Minds!
We were a mental health initiative between 2016-2023 for Berlin’s early career researchers.
The PhD journey
Pursuing a PhD is an adventure: Ideally, students get to follow their personal interests and gain profound knowledge of their field. However, this time can also be emotionally and physically demanding.
A study in US-American grad students reported high levels of stress and burn-out, fear of failure, long and unpredictable working hours, and financial strain (Boren, 2013). This is also true for PhD students in Germany. According to a recent survey of the Max Planck PhDnet, 53% of the students surveyed suffered from symptoms such as depression, burnout, chronic fatigue, sleeplessness and migraines. More than half of this group thought that these symptoms were directly related to their position as a PhD.
Our mission
Between 2016 and 2023, we have empowered early career researchers (ECRs) by creating awareness about and destigmatizing mental health problems. Find resources on our website about
- Web-resources about how to find help in Berlin for ECRs
- Digital resources about mental health
- Our mental health survey(s)
- Past activities such as our PhD toolkit, our Mental Health Conference, and our Growing Up in Science Berlin
Find help in Berlin
There are multiple places where students can seek psychotherapy or social counseling. We have collected contacts in the Berlin area.
Resources
There is a lot of information out there that can help you to learn more about new strategies on how to cope with any mental health issue.
Survey
We have conducted a survey to investigate mental health-related questions with PhD students in Berlin. Check out our results here.
Past activities
We have organize events to support PhD students and to de-stigmatize discussions of mental health issues in academia.
We were awarded with one of 100 startsocial consultation scholarships for social initiatives! From November 2021 to February 2022 we will have the honor to work together with two coaches who will accompany us on our way towards making our initiative more sustainable and professional. Thank you, startsocial, for giving us this opportunity!
