Research, Mental Health and Traumatising Contexts: How to Take Care?

With Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine, researchers and
institutions became more aware of the fact that research on
traumatising incidents also affects the researcher: Reading about
war and violence, or interviewing victims and witnesses may impair
the researchers’ own mental health. Especially, since researchers
may have experienced war or other traumatizing situations in their
own past, or may work in precarious situations. In this podcast, we
ask what effects research on traumatising contexts may have on
researchers, and what individuals, but also academia as an
institution can do in order to mitigate the effect. Christa
Cocciole, a systems therapist whose work is trauma informed with a
focus on the body, and Hanna Vakhitova, assistant professor and
senior economist at Kyiv School of Economics talk to Kerstin Bischl
(KonKoop/ZOiS) about mental health in academia, and personal as
well as institutional ways to take care. (Music: “Complete” by
Modul is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0-License.)