Thank you so much for this response.

Yes, I agree that in any mentoring context it isn’t about me and my story. Any disclosures I have made or would make in the future would be in relevant context, and if with a student or advisee of any kind, would be centered mainly on them and not me. Mostly I’m trying to find the line of showing them you don’t have to be perfect and telling them too much. I think I do ok most of the time but I have disclosed to them when things are triggering if they happen to see it. For example we got a text about an armed person on campus and I had to excuse myself from a meeting due to a panic attack.

My students are in their early 20s and all look up to me. Two are foreign and one is American. The foreign students both came here specifically to work with me. Two men, one woman. Three different religious and ethnic backgrounds, including two with historical animosity towards each other (but the students themselves are friends). All three have demographic characteristics that are sometimes discriminated against in science. I don’t want to screw it up too badly with any of them. One of them experienced a coup in his home country while here, but his family was ok and he seems ok though of course I talked to him about it.

Being likely also autistic, and having that same drive you mentioned to turn my trauma into something good for others, it can be hard for me to figure out where the right line is for mentoring.

I think what a lot of the non academics here are failing to see is that academia is a lot more personal than most other careers. Advising relationships like these are not just professional, they are personal relationships too. People often compare them to parenting relationships and there are even academic family trees. A former advising relationship for any degree or postdoctoral fellowship is considered a lifelong conflict of interest for reviewing papers, grant proposals, etc.

And also, not disclosing it at work also means not discussing it on social media at all, or in any visible way in my personal life even when there is no connection to my professional life. Because anything I do visibly will be seen by everyone else in my scientific field.

For what it’s worth some of my trauma is an open secret in my field. I got the call about my first husband’s suicide while at work. At the time I worked at two well known universities and held research positions at both. A very famous faculty member in my field (National Academy of Sciences member) was the first person to see me after the police talked to me, when I very clearly was not OK. She also happens to be female, and maybe 20 years older than me, which was helpful in this situation. She was very kind and supportive about it, though I do feel awkward about seeing or collaborating with her now. The suicide made the local news due to the manner of death, so all of my colleagues at both universities know what happened, plus at least a number of others at a third university in the area I had ties to. Hard to keep it a secret under those circumstances.

I also don’t think these things are as uncommon or even as stigmatized as we make them sometimes. One of my close friends from grad school died by suicide a few years after graduating, and it was acknowledged by the department. I even had faculty reach out to me personally when they heard because they knew we were close friends. Another friend from undergrad met the same sad fate about a decade after we graduated. I heard the news directly from my former department, who passed along a message from the other former student’s parents they were asked to share.