Gran Bretaña: The pressure of academia drove me to heroin

Last December I finally told my partner that I had been taking heroin for two months. She was shocked and angry, but supportive. She knew that I had been horribly unhappy. Over the past three years, I had gone through wave after wave of depression due to overwork in my job as a senior lecturer.

Five months ago, the inevitable happened. I had a depressive episode on the very first day of term. I felt suicidal. Not “they’ll be sorry when I’m gone” but “how can I put this person who happens to be me out of their misery?”.

I went for the second-best thing: I bought a gram of heroin. I smoked some and felt better – so much better that I threw out the rest. But the next day was just as bad. Within a week, I’d bought another gram. This time I didn’t throw any out.

It was the first time I had tried heroin, but I’d had experience with other class-A drugs. The internet provided me with the information I needed to find, purchase and smoke it. I did the rest.

My problems started when I quit my job as a senior lecturer in Australia to take up a similar position at a top research university in the south of England. My partner and I thought this would be a sound career move for both of us. I had relatively few papers for my career stage, but they were well-cited.

We had good reason to move – my partner was finishing her PhD and we knew that it would be difficult for us both to get academic jobs in the same city. In Australia, where the distances between settlements are so great, that would be difficult to manage. In the UK, we hoped things would be easier.

However, I hadn’t reckoned on the high cost of living in England. My pay had doubled but the rent on a small apartment was more than double the cost of our mortgage in Australia. We had also overestimated the ease with which my partner could get a job. There were more academic jobs going in England but there were more hungry young PhDs graduates applying for them too.

The other thing I hadn’t expected was the scale of the workload. The teaching commitment was high – about 10 contact hours per week (double what I had experienced before). During term time, I was spending the whole working week either teaching or preparing to teach, with no time for research.

I found myself lying awake at night worrying about our finances. Worrying about whether I was a good teacher. Worrying about how I would find time for research. Insomnia wasn’t normal for me, but it had crept up, so I didn’t see it as unusual. After a difficult phone call with a colleague, I started crying and couldn’t stop. My partner urged me to make an appointment with the doctor – I was given anti-depressants and a letter to say I would be unfit for work for the next four weeks.The sick leave was supposed to give me space to try to figure out what the problem was and how I was going to solve it. This is a bad idea when you are depressed, because depressed people tend to attribute problems to their own failings. I thought that I must be managing my time poorly, and working inefficiently. I spent my sick leave reading books on time management and consulting my colleagues to find out how they dealt with the workload. Their advice included:

“Learn to say no”

Anyone who thinks you can deal with overwork by saying no has never been over-worked. I tried refusing to chair a committee. My head of department breezily assured me that he was not asking, he was telling me what I was contractually obliged to do.

“Work weekends and evenings during term and take whole weekdays off during the vacation”

I can’t believe I actually thought this was a good idea. I would spend six days a week working and the seventh doing housework. When the vacation did roll around, I would crash into exhaustion and depression and feel guilty that I wasn’t doing research or getting ahead on teaching for the next term.“Stick it out for now, let people know that you’re movable and take another job that’s more to your taste”

This was reasonably good advice, in a way. I am lucky that I am established enough to be reasonably confident of getting another academic job. But with no time for research, every year that passed made my CV look weaker (or so it seemed to me) and my depression meant that I was in no fit state to sell myself at an interview.

And so I blundered on. The next three years followed a pattern. I would start full of conviction that I could turn the situation around. I would work harder and longer – and each year I would reach breaking point, collapse with a depressive episode, take sick leave and mull over what I had done wrong this time. The episodes got earlier and longer. Each year I ended up with a higher dose of anti-depressants. And finally, heroin.

I’ve been clean for three months now and my partner and I both resigned our jobs – we are going to move home. I have a lot of work to do to repair our relationship, but I am much happier.

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