Authors: Ana Álvarez Yenes, Carmen Martín Valderrama

On February 2021, we had the opportunity to listen to Dr. Andrea Welsh talk about mental health and specially how it affects pre-PhD Students in an online webinar. Dr. Andrea Welsh is a postdoctoral researcher and instructor at the University of Pittsburgh Department of Mathematics where she works on dynamics in neuroscience. She has written articles about mental health in Physics Today, oSTEM blog, and Physics Magazine. In her talk, she did not only give information on the topic but also provided with lots of useful resources and tools to help us actively work on our wellbeing.

I found this talk very necessary, as it shone light on some taboo issues that people might not identify on themselves or others, or they might be afraid to talk about. The webinar as whole was a well-structured guide on what is mental health, how to identify when it is affected and what to do to improve it. Dr. Welsh provided many studies on the topic, but most importantly, she gave tips that all attendees (students and mentors) can apply to their daily work life in order to make the scientific world more welcoming. The highlight for me is that Dr. Welsh also shared some online communities on Twitter or Slack (in which she is involved) that allow young scientist all over the world to support each other, specially in the current times. Some of them are the following:

• Chronically Academic - https://chronicallyacademic.org/
  
• Chronically Invisible - https://www.chronically-invisible.com/
  
• Disabled in STEM - https://disabledinstem.wordpress.com/
  
• Voices of Academia - https://voicesofacademia.com/
  
• Open Academics – https://www.oacommunity.org/
  
• Dragonfly Mental Health - http://dragonflymentalhealth.com
  
• The Mighty - https://themighty.com/
  

During the questions at the end of the talk there was an interesting discussion during which both the speaker and the attenders shared their personal experiences and advise when dealing with mental health.

Overall, it was a very positive and welcoming webinar on a topic that might be difficult to talk about, with lessons that are very useful in the scientific world but also in all aspects of life. I would recommend anybody to attend this kind of talk, even if their mental health is great as we can always help make the atmosphere we work in a little better.  In the end, as Dr. Welsh said: “Working hard is important but feeling good is important too.”