Hi, I am a PhD student who was agonising from a very personal issue. I believe that I had a problem continuously pinging me. When you are devoted to some work (academics) & all of a sudden you start having some forceful distraction or peer pressure to think on (non - academic) many times one tends to de-rail from the path even though temporarily. Similar thing was happening to me. People told me that “do you really need treatment for such a simple matter!” But, I knew yourself better. Just like a sore throat may be taken for granted.

I was going through pretty frustrating days of my Ph.D. I was struggling with my work; my papers were getting rejected; not many people were interested to talk about my work at conferences. I used to end up crying almost every night. Long hours of work in the lab and time taking erroneous simulations were coiling up depression inside me. My distance relationship with my boyfriend and the would-be husband was also affected. There came a time when I started feeling demotivated to work and even stopped going to the lab. I felt that something was miserably wrong inside me.

In my first year at IIT B I used to spend the whole day trying to study and while studying I would regularly get intense headaches and eye pain. I tried consulting many doctors on what the possible cause could be but often they would just diagnose it as a symptom of common cold and would prescribe me the famous IITB cough syrup. Even though I used to have these recurring headaches I pushed myself through my first year as I was desperately trying to do a branch change. Fortunately the first year got over and I luckily managed to get a branch change.

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?I found it really difficult to survive at IIT in my initial days.??It was my first time staying away from home. Competitive environment, academic pressure and struggle to stay at a hostel thousands of km away from home made my life like hell. Wait, here I didn't mean IIT is a horrible place for a mediocre student like me. Actually, it was me who was extremely panicked. I was worried about my performance and never ready to leave my comfort zone. I remember the day before my endsem exam, I was crying for almost three hours in front of Hima Anaredy Ma'am.