Pretty fucking far from OK.

Evening all,

This will be quite a personal post. Caution for those experiencing their own traumas, you may want to skip this and await another post.

Over the last while it's dawned on me that I wasn't quite feeling myself. A bit withdrawn in social situations, lacking energy, "a bit down", as they say. Nonetheless I got up every morning, went downstairs and got to work. And kept working. I eat at my desk. I rarely got out for bike rides (which I love), but did manage to walk my dogs every day. But apart from that, and cooking dinner for Mrs Guerilla, I basically just worked.

That's because there was never a time when I didn't have pressing matters, something that needed to be done. It was like trying to drink out of a firehose. And eventually, I found myself quite wet, if you want to think about it like that.

And when you have a trip upcoming, that becomes the thing on the horizon. Something to look forward to, and a change of pace. I kept working when I was overseas, meetings early on the morning or late on the afternoon, decisions to be made, matters to be completed.

But since I've returned, I haven't felt better. I've felt a lot worse. Now, there's a bit of a back story, some of which I've touched on in earlier posts. In May last year I received death threats, and I continued to received them up until March this year. A dozen by my count, including one on Christmas day. This isn't "upset student" threats. While that's unpleasant, this was something quite different.

Serious content warning. Don't read the text in the pics below if you have your own traumas- rape, death, etc. Skip through to my para below, the point is there.

These are threats from HD Education, the people who provide contract cheating services to many, many students in Australia, and likely elsewhere. I first became aware of their existence in 2018 when I found a group of 170-odd students contract cheating in a cluster. These are the people providing large scale contract cheating services to students, presumably at many unis, but not many unis report anything, so who knows? I would place a large bet that the vast majority of unis in Australia have never encountered them, but this means that your unis are fucking riddled with contract cheating, across whole degree programs.

Now, there are a range of ways to think and respond to these types of messages. I contacted the uni's EAP (employee assistance program). I had to wait a week to get an appointment. I got some breathing exercises. And that's about it. Not much help. And so I soldiered on. I thought that the shock of this would drop like water off a duck's back. It didn't.

I've been a blood donor for twenty years, and they take my blood pressure when I donate. 120/80, like clockwork. Until last year. It started to rise. My chest started to feel what I can only describe as constricted. I started having heart palpitations. Being a 48 year old man, I went off to the doctor. Did a series of blood tests. Another series. Got referred to a cardiologist. Did MRIs. Did stress tests, wore monitors. After all that, they had no answer. No explanation for what I was feeling.

So fast forward a bit, and the last few weeks have been bad. Intrusive thoughts, every time I work I feel like my cortisol is going up. Even walking the dogs was no relief.

So I went back to the doctor. I explained what i was feeling, and without saying so she ran a psychological screen on me. And so she believes I have PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. The water didn't fall off this duck's back. I'm off to a psychological shortly, and I'm taking a couple of weeks off.

But I'm left with a few thoughts. Of course, I'm blaming myself for not seeking psych support earlier, but in my defence I was focused on physical symptoms. But once there was no answer to what was happening there, I went looking elsewhere.

But I'm also thinking that while student wellbeing is a topic that gets quite a lot of focus (and budgets that dwarf that of my team), staff wellbeing is barely an afterthought, even in circumstances that should have triggered an immediate response. Instead I got EAP and a risk assessment.

Questions such as "let me know what I can do to support you" become dull and aggravating when they come from people paid more than you (in my case Australian HEW level 9). If it's not actual support which actually addresses an obvious trauma, these questions are lip service. If someone had their hand cut off at work, would an appropriate response be "tell me what I can do to support you"? I didn't think so. Furthermore, if the response isn't a concrete acknowledgement of skyrocketing workloads which exacerbate the injury through stress, it's also not helpful. It's a reminder that no help will ever arrive.

Sorry to drop all this, it's a lot I know. But as a compulsive unvarnisher, I needed to get it off my chest. I'm sure you'll forgive any typos.

Until next time,

KM