As I have written in previous blogs before, I am a disabled PGR student. A lot of people might have certain perceptions of the everyday struggles faced as a disabled PGR. While from my experience there is a collective understanding and consensus of some of the issues faced, every disabled person is different and experiences things in their own ways. I wanted to write this blog to highlight some key areas that non-disabled people might not realise is part of my own experience and how it impacts my work and life. I have also based this blog post on other generic examples that I know fellow disabled PGRs have to deal with too. 

Life Admin

What I don’t think a lot of people in academia realise about those who are disabled is the amount of administration required on top of anything work related. I know others who have described it as another job. This may include time for health-related appointments, admin around treatments, dealing with government benefits offices, anything around working requirements at the University…and many more. I really would like others to realise this because it takes up a lot of time. For me, this means what can happen is there is less time left for taking up opportunities in research (i.e. conferences and paper writing), and the consequence can be getting ill more quickly and frequently than others if I do push myself. As I’m sure you can guess, this does have an impact on my academic portfolio by perhaps not having published lots or taken on lots of teaching because health and admin around this has had to come first. 

Imposter syndrome and trusting yourself 

With managing a lot of health problems and not always predicting what may come up during studies, learning to trust your own judgement as to whether to do something is tricky. For example, if you don’t always know whether something is going to cause extreme fatigue for days afterwards like data collection, this can sometimes have a knock-on effect with regards to confidence, progress and task completion time. It can also create more worry about what others may think about your productivity. I have noticed this has impacted doubt around my capabilities of doing work and how credible I am for actually doing my work. Similarly, having experiences of medical professionals not believing or supporting you frequently in the way you need can really impact your confidence to trust yourself in other areas of life. This very often crosses over into how I experience the research environment where we naturally need to voice our thoughts and ideas and critiqued for thess. 

Living in an ever-changing system

While I understand improvements of systems in higher education need to continue and take time, people are still impacted in the time changes that are being made. The real-time impact of things is not always considered, only that if efforts are trying to be made, then that appears to be some kind of end point in and excuse for lack of empathy in the meantime. For example, waiting for a diagnosis can be a really anxiety-inducing time. You have to bring up all of your problems with a medical professional (perhaps more than once too) which can be traumatic, then await their results. The waiting game can be very difficult in that worrying if the diagnosis is not made after time, you can feel like you are making things up, or that you have lost time beforehand from not having the correct support. Then, if medication is being explored, this can take a long time to get the right titration and dealing with unwanted side effects during this process. I hope this point helps people to realise how much there is involed with seeking support and that it is a continous process, not an end point. I wanted to thank you for taking the time to read this blog post. I could have written more but I wanted this to be fairly focused on a couple of points and the wider impact on myself as a disabled person. I hope this has brought something new for you to reflect upon or think about whether you were aware of such issues before or not. Together we can make more inclusive environments if we allow ourselves to be even just a little more understanding and empathetic towards others.