The academic year 2013-14 changed the direction of Wendy Ingram’s life. Over the course of a few months, four members of the UC Berkeley department in which she was a graduate student died by suicide: an undergraduate student, a doctoral student, a post-doctoral fellow and a faculty member.
The tragic events left many in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology (MCB) reeling, but Ingram also found that the suicides prompted co-workers to share their own mental health issues. She discovered that, like herself, about half the people she talked to had sought therapy at some point in their lives.
“Everyone was struggling, but none of us was talking to each other about it,” Ingram said. “There was a humongous cultural and professional stigma against struggling with your mind. If you are reliant on your mind for the work you’re doing, there’s this inherent pressure to ‘have nothing wrong with your brain,’ because that’s the most important tool that we work with when we’re in the academic space, when we’re in research.”
She graduated with a Ph.D. in 2014, but returned to campus in 2018 — during her training as a postdoctoral fellow in psychiatric epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University — to develop and test interventions that she said encourage people to be “more open about sharing that they’re struggling and increase their chances and ability to get the help that they need.”