The Paradox of Vulnerability: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis of Mental Health Among Academicians in Malaysian Public Universities.

Introduction

Academicians occupy a position in which the more expertise and authority a role projects, the less room it appears to leave for admitting struggle. Such struggle may often be kept hidden, as mental distress can be met with disdain, reflecting enduring societal stigma. This unfolds against a global backdrop of deteriorating mental health that has quietly taken a toll on the academic workforce, making academics’ mental distress and suffering a critical issue.

Positioned as authoritative figureheads of knowledge, academics occupy a significant role in our society and are often placed on a high pedestal. However, this very society may be less inclined to accept their mental suffering, consistent with how a concealable, discrediting attribute, once known, can reduce a person in others’ eyes to a diminished, “spoiled” identity.1 Among other knowledge professionals, this plays out concretely as workplace concealment: mental health professionals who disclose psychological distress at work commonly report shame and fear of being seen as “weak”.2 This possible tension between academicians’ outward professional identity and their inner mental health struggles is what this study terms the paradox of vulnerability. This term is used here as a sensitizing concept informed by the gap identified in the literature, with its specific content and boundaries developed through engagement with participants’ accounts during analysis rather than fixed in advance.

It is therefore used throughout as an interpretative conceptualisation rather than an established construct.

Global attention to mental health has grown rapidly in recognition of its far-reaching, often under-recognized impact on society. It has substantial implications for both policy and practice. The World Health Organization (WHO) and International Labour Organization (ILO) report that over one billion people worldwide live with a mental disorder.

It is estimated that depression and anxiety alone cost 12 billion lost working days and USD 1 trillion in lost productivity annually, underscoring the scale of mental health’s societal impact.3,4

Within the higher education scenario, academics are facing multifaceted demands. Their workload demands teaching, research, administration, student supervision and mentoring. These work demands are further compounded by institutional pressures.

Some of these institutional pressures are to publish, secure grant funding, and meet key performance metrics, which have placed an untold burden on academics’ mental health.5 However, despite this rising concern over the toll on academics, mental health research in higher education remains disproportionately centred on students rather than on the staff who teach and support them.

In Malaysia specifically, this concern has grown increasingly pressing.6 A national survey found that 2.3% of Malaysians aged 18 and above suffer from depression.7 In the context of Malaysian academic institutions, 27.7% of academics were screened positive for clinical depression. This was linked to factors such as low income, urban campus settings, and inadequate workplace amenities.8 Another study conducted in a Malaysian public university found staff experiencing perceived symptoms of depression (28.7%), anxiety (50.1%), and stress (14.8%). Further studies on Malaysian academics show their mental health levels were lower than those employees in the non-service sector.6,9

The mental health challenges facing academicians may be shaped by an underexamined tension specific to the academic role. Academicians hold an authoritative position in society, widely regarded as composed, capable knowledge bearers. Yet this same position may make it especially difficult to acknowledge their personal struggle whereby admitting vulnerability may be perceived as contradicting the professional identity the role demands.

Three dimensions relevant to this tension remain underexplored in higher education mental health research: workload, professional competence and identity, and stigma surrounding disclosure. These dimensions, and the theoretical perspectives that illuminate them, are developed in full in the Literature Review.

Despite the growing literature on mental health, three gaps stand out. Firstly, the current body of literature is dominated by quantitative, cross sectional surveys and systematic reviews of survey data.5,6,10 Qualitative studies using lived experience methodologies remain comparatively rare, and narrative accounts of how academicians describe their distress are similarly limited in the current literature. Secondly, in the context of Malaysian higher education, research has primarily focused on mental health amongst school teachers11 rather than university academicians.9 Finally, most studies have taken a narrow theoretical perspective on mental health, and only a few have synthesized a multi theoretical perspective.

This study addresses the above gaps systematically by employing a qualitative, single method design. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) was selected to carry out an in-depth, idiographic exploration of academicians’ lived experience of their own mental health as academic professionals. This study’s research question is: How do academicians in Malaysian universities experience and make sense of their mental health within the demands of their professional academic role?

The structure of this study is outlined below. Literature Review examines global and local literature and presents a multi theoretical perspective. Subsequently, Research Methodology provides the elements of research design.

Analysis presents the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis findings as a single, integrated account spanning the academicians’ lived experience. Finally, Discussion and Conclusion provides a detailed discussion linked to the current and past literature. This culminates with the theoretical and managerial implications, limitations, and recommendations for future research.

Literature Review

Mental Health Among Academicians: Global and Malaysian Context

Mental health concerns among university academicians have received growing international attention, even as research attention within higher education has historically centred on students rather than the staff who teach and support them. Across multiple regions and study designs, the global literature converges on workload and institutional support as central determinants of academic distress.

A systematic review spanning numerous countries identified a multitude of factors contributing to mental health distress amongst academicians. This review, based on 60 studies, identified excessive workload, lack of institutional support, and workplace conflict as key risk factors. It also found that collegial support and participative leadership served as protective factors that countered these effects.5 These findings are in tandem with an earlier large-scale, cross-sectional study of 2,353 higher education staff across 16 countries, which found that 73% of higher education staff experienced moderate to very high levels of psychological distress.

Burnout was significantly associated with job insecurity, gender, and multiple comorbidities.12 These earlier findings converge with evidence from a qualitative UK study, which similarly attributed rising staff burnout to the expansion of academic duties under increasingly neoliberal institutional pressures. In this study, one participant described the expectation to perform as a “jazz hands lecturer”, simultaneously playing the role of researcher, pastoral carer, and performer of constant student engagement.13

Despite this convergence on workload and structural conditions as primary drivers, the literature diverges meaningfully in where it locates the underlying mechanism. The second school of thought studies mental distress through an individual’s psychological lens. One notable concept is the impostor phenomenon, whereby an individual believes they are less competent than their position implies, despite evidence of success.

A study on higher education faculty found that faculty staff experienced moderate levels of imposter phenomenon with the highest reported by untenured faculty staff. Results also indicate that emotional exhaustion is positively related to impostor phenomenon.14 Supporting this is a study on STEM faculty, linking the impostor phenomenon directly to peer comparison, performance evaluation, and the anticipatory fear of not knowing.15

An emerging third strand of literature from the UK and India shows a stark contrast in its findings. These findings interestingly attribute central causes of mental health issues not to workload or individual psychology but rather to stigma and the concealment of distress. A comprehensive systematic review on mental health revealed that individuals were cautious and less willing to disclose psychological distress at work than in social circles.

The reason for this stemmed from a fear of stigma at their workplace.2 This finding is further supported by a study on workplace mental health disclosure in India, which identified psychological safety and perceived social support as key facilitators of disclosure.16 Conversely, stigma and low self-efficacy emerged as the primary barriers that discouraged individuals from disclosing mental health concerns in the workplace.16

Across these three strands of literature, one consistent conclusion emerges where individual level interventions are important, multilevel and integrated strategies are needed to strengthen mental health support in higher education.17 However, this study also points to a gap between what the literature identifies as causal and how effectively institutions have so far chosen to respond. Taken together, these three aspects, structural workload, individual psychological, stigma and disclosure, are not necessarily competing explanations but may instead represent different facets of a single, multi-dimensional phenomenon, each illuminating one part of why academic distress persists despite growing institutional and scholarly attention.

Within Malaysia, this broader pattern is replicated. One review reports that the prevalence of mental health problems among Malaysian adults rose to 31.1% in 2019.6 Within academic institutions specifically, clinical depression was found to affect 27.7% of academic staff in one Malaysian study,8 while a survey of staff at a Malaysian public university found depression, anxiety, and stress prevalence of 28.7%, 50.1%, and 14.8% respectively. Malaysian academicians’ mental health levels are notably lower than those of workers in the non-service sector,6,9 yet research addressing this population specifically remains limited, with most Malaysian studies instead focusing on school teachers rather than university academicians, a gap consistent with the broader international pattern, in which mental health research in higher education has disproportionately centred on students over staff.6,10 This is the specific literature gap that the present study seeks to address.

Table 1 provides a global literature outlook. It tabulates studies drawn across Ecuador, South Africa, the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Malaysia, including two global systematic reviews and one 16-country cross-sectional study, published between 2015 and 2025. Table 1Summary of Key Literature on Academic Mental Health (Global and Malaysian Context)Author(s) (Year)RegionDesignSampleTheoretical Lens/Key ConstructKey Findings[5]Ecuador/GlobalSystematic review60 studies, ~43,639 staffJob Demands-Resources (implicit)Workload, lack of institutional support, workplace conflict are key risk factors[17]South Africa/GlobalSystematic review7 studiesIntervention effectivenessIndividual-level interventions dominate, with limited holistic integration[14]USASurveyFaculty (n=61)Impostor PhenomenonUntenured faculty highest impostor tendencies[15]USAQualitative56 interviewsImpostor PhenomenonImpostor phenomenon: peer comparison, evaluation, fear of not knowing[2]UKSystematic review9 studies, 1,891 participantsDisclosure Processes ModelStigma inhibits disclosure of distress at work[16]IndiaQualitative/TA15 interviewsSocial Support Theory (implicit)Psychological safety, social support enable disclosure[12]Global (16 countries)Cross-sectional2,353 staffJob insecurity, resilient coping73% moderate-very high psychological distress, burnout linked to female gender and job insecurity[13]UKQualitative/TA23 participantsNeoliberalism/role expansionRole expansion (“jazz hands lecturer”), neoliberal pressures drive burnout[10]MalaysiaSurvey459 staff–Depression 28.7%, anxiety 50.1%, stress 14.8%[6]MalaysiaSystematic review30 studies–Six major themes emerged as significant predictors of poor mental health among educators[9]MalaysiaConceptualN/AJob Demands-ResourcesAcademician-specific research remains limitedNotes: Studies are ordered by region, moving from global systematic reviews toward the Malaysian context central to this study.

A dash indicates no explicit theoretical framework was stated.

Theoretical Perspectives: Four Lenses on Academic Vulnerability

This study draws on four classes of theory, which are used not to drive the analysis but to contextualise and illuminate the interpretation of participants’ accounts. These theories are stress and burnout theory, motivation theory, stigma and disclosure theory, and help seeking theory. Collectively, these perspectives offer ways of understanding how workload may relate to distress, why role demands may erode wellbeing, why distress may stay concealed, and what may shape whether academicians seek support.

Several seminal theories provide an in-depth perspective on stress and burnout.18–22 These theories published in a 20-year time frame have a similar and almost identical convergence. These theories positioned burnout as the product of imbalance rather than demand alone. Notably, these theories have some form of divergence.

They diverge in where they locate the cause of the problem. Job Demands Resources and Demand Control models locate it in job structure, specifically the ratio of demands to resources and the degree of control over the work processes.18,20 In contrast, Conservation of Resources theory relocates it within the individual. This theory points it at the person, as depletion of finite energy and time.19 The Effort-Reward Imbalance model provides a further divergence.

It frames burnout relationally, as the result of effort not matched by recognition.22 Regardless of mechanism, all these theories converge on one resulting state which is exhaustion, depersonalization, reduced accomplishment.21

Another category of theories is the motivation-based theory and impostor-based theory. These theories converge on competence as the threatened psychological need.23–26 Nonetheless, these theories diverge in framing. Self-Determination Theory treats competence as a key driver of motivation.24,25 In contrast, impostor phenomenon frames the affected individual’s perception as one of intellectual fraudulence.

In this aspect, the affected individual feels success is undeserved. They attribute their success to luck or deception rather than genuine ability, despite clear evidence of achievement.23 Attribution theory offers a further complementary lens.26 This theory explains how the causal explanations individuals give for setbacks can shape their emotional and psychological responses. In the academic field, this may mean that a rejected grant or a negative evaluation may affect an academic’s emotional and psychological responses.

While the present findings were not analysed specifically for attributional patterns, this theory remains a useful lens for understanding why such setbacks may be experienced as personally diminishing rather than externally caused.

Another aspect of theories has focused on stigma and disclosure. These theories have converged on concealment as rational risk management.1,27 They diverge by approach. Stigma is defined as an attribute that discredits an individual, reducing them “from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one”.1 Stigmatizing attributes can vary, and may involve perceived weaknesses of character from conditions like mental illness.

The Disclosure Processes Model explains disclosure of a concealable stigmatized identity as a decision shaped by competing approach goals (eg, seeking support, relieving the burden of concealment) and avoidance goals (eg, fear of rejection or discrimination), which in turn shape the disclosure event and its downstream psychological and relational outcomes.27 Complementing this, social support theory highlights how the availability of trusted relationships shapes whether disclosure feels safe, with psychological safety and perceived social support identified as key enablers of disclosure among Indian workplace samples.16

The dominant theories of help seeking28 frame it as a weighed decision, not an automatic response to distress. The Health Belief Model remains confined to individual perception such as susceptibility, severity, and benefits versus barriers.28 The Behavioural Model of Health Services Use complements this individual level focus by identifying enabling factors, such as institutional access and available resources, as equally decisive in whether help seeking translates into actual service use.29 The implication from these studies is clear in that changing perceptions alone, without improving access, is unlikely to produce meaningful change.

Together, these four categories offer complementary vantage points rather than a predetermined model to be tested. Consistent with IPA’s inductive and idiographic commitments, the analysis proceeded from participants’ own accounts, and these perspectives are drawn on in the Discussion to contextualise and illuminate what emerged. Any relationships among them proposed in this paper (Discussion) are therefore offered as a theoretically informed interpretation arising from the findings, not as a framework the study set out to confirm.

Research Methodology

Research Design

Philosophical/Epistemological Position

This study is situated within an interpretivist paradigm, which is suitable given that interpretivism uncovers the meanings people attach to their experiences, values the subjective interpretations and emotions that shape their understanding of the world, and emphasises the importance of context in shaping these interpretations.30 IPA was selected for this study because it is deeply rooted in phenomenology and hermeneutics, allowing participants to interpret their own experience and the researcher, in turn, to interpret that account. This reflects the double hermeneutic epistemological concept, whereby the researcher’s interpretation is layered onto the participant’s own sense making of the mental health issue, including participants’ own sense making of the institutional and structural conditions within which that experience is embedded.31

Qualitative Single Method Design Rationale

A single qualitative method, Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, was applied throughout this study to address the study’s research question, which requires detailed, idiographic, in-depth attention to individual experience alongside the institutional conditions participants experienced as shaping that experience. IPA’s double hermeneutic, in which the researcher’s interpretation is layered onto participants’ own sense making, supports this aim whereby the same idiographic, cross-case analytic process was applied to participants’ lived mental health experience and to the institutional conditions as they surfaced within participants’ accounts.

Sampling and Participants

This study employed purposive sampling, whereby participants were deliberately selected based on characteristics relevant to the research question rather than randomly.32 This approach was chosen specifically to capture variation in faculty, academic rank, and years of experience across multiple Malaysian public universities, supporting the identification of structural and institutional patterns. Participants were eligible if they were full-time academic staff with a minimum of one year’s experience. No requirement for a self-identified mental health challenge was applied at the point of eligibility.

A total of 14 participants initially completed the interview. Following data quality review, two participants were excluded on the grounds that their responses did not contribute sufficient richness or analytical depth to address the research question, consistent with the principle that sample sufficiency in qualitative research is determined by the information power of the data rather than numerical thresholds alone. Specifically, both excluded participants gave responses during the interview stage that were noticeably evasive and often diverged from the interview questions, limiting the richness of experiential material obtained.

This determination was made by the lead researcher (first author, A.R.B.S.) during and immediately following data collection, prior to transcription and formal analysis. The final sample therefore comprises 12 participants. Beyond these two post hoc exclusions, no participants refused to take part or withdrew after providing consent.

Of the 12 participants, six (Participant 1, Participant 2, Participant 4, Participant 6, Participant 7, and Participant 9) voluntarily self-identified a significant personal mental health challenge at recruitment. This was not an eligibility requirement, and their accounts feature prominently in the themes on lived experience, while the full sample of 12 informed the themes on structural and institutional conditions. The remaining six participants, while not self-identifying a formal mental health challenge at recruitment, nonetheless described relevant experiences of chronic strain, eroding professional confidence, and concealment consistent with the study’s broader focus on vulnerability.

Therefore, their accounts were also included in the analysis of lived experience, reflecting the study’s interest in the lived experience of vulnerability along a spectrum rather than in a clinically diagnosed subgroup alone. Table 2 tabulates the demographic profile of participants. Table 2Demographic Profile of IPA Participants: Mental Health Experiences Among Academicians in Malaysian Public UniversitiesParticipant IDAgeGenderAcademic RankFaculty/DisciplineYears in AcademiaMarital StatusSelf-Identified Mental Health ChallengeStatusParticipant 157MaleProfessorBusiness & Management15–Mental exhaustionIncludedParticipant 234MaleLecturerBusiness & Management2Not marriedExhaustion, disorientationIncludedParticipant 349FemaleSenior LecturerBusiness & Management20Single–IncludedParticipant 455MaleAssociate ProfessorBusiness & Management25MarriedBurnout, anxiety, exhaustion, stress, sleep difficultiesIncludedParticipant 568MaleProfessorEducation42Married–IncludedParticipant 639MaleSenior LecturerBusiness & Management7MarriedAnxietyIncludedParticipant 756FemaleSenior LecturerBusiness & Management11MarriedBurnout, exhaustion, stress, disorientation, low self-confidence, sleep difficultiesIncludedParticipant 837MaleSenior LecturerBusiness & Management10Divorced–IncludedParticipant 953MaleAssociate ProfessorBusiness & Management25MarriedBurnout, exhaustion, stressIncludedParticipant 1046FemaleSenior LecturerBusiness & Management10Single–IncludedParticipant 1165MaleProfessorEducation40Married–IncludedParticipant 1232FemaleLecturerArts & Humanities (Mass Communication)8Married–IncludedParticipant 1355MaleAssociate ProfessorBusiness & Management10Married–Excluded*Participant 1444MaleSenior LecturerBusiness & Management–Single–Excluded*Mean (N=12)49.3–––17.9–––Range (N=12)32–68–––2–42–––Notes: Participants are identified by numbered participant IDs rather than named pseudonyms, with academic role reported directly, consistent with the analytically relevant detail being the participant’s role rather than an individual name.

A dash (-) indicates information not provided by the participant. Mean and range calculated for the 12 included participants only. *Excluded on the grounds of insufficient data richness and analytical depth.33 Self-identified mental health challenge reflects participants’ own description at recruitment and is not a clinical diagnosis. In the self-identified mental health challenge column, a dash (-) indicates none was self-identified.

Data Collection

Data were collected via semi-structured interviews, and the interview schedule made as a flexible guideline (see Supplementary Appendix A for interview schedule). This included how they understood the relationship between their professional authority and personal vulnerability, alongside their perceptions of workload systems, promotion and career structures, institutional support services, and leadership and departmental culture as these relate to staff mental health. The interview guide followed a funnelling approach.34 Interviews opened with broad, non-leading questions before narrowing into more specific prompts as each interview progressed, so that participants could set out their own account before being probed on particular details.

The interview guide was piloted with two non-participating academicians prior to data collection to check question clarity and flow, following a comparable approach used in an IPA study of paediatric nurse leaders.35 Interviews lasted approximately 55 to 90 minutes and were conducted in a private setting of the participant’s choosing to support comfortable disclosure. Each session was audio recorded and transcribed verbatim by the first author (A.R.B.S.), preserving participants’ own wording, including pauses and false starts, rather than being cleaned into standard prose. This process supported close, idiographic engagement with participants’ own language during analysis and underpins the verbatim quotations.

Each recording was also accompanied by brief field notes. All interviews were jointly conducted by the first author (A.R.B.S.) and the second author (R.S.). No individuals outside this two-member research team were present.

Each participant was interviewed once, with no repeat interviews conducted.

Analytic Procedure

Transcripts were analysed following the established IPA process,31,36 consistent with IPA’s emphasis on close, interpretive engagement with each transcript. The following steps were followed during analysis:

Transcripts were read and re-read thoroughly to obtain a general sense of each participant’s account. Simultaneously, exploratory noting was conducted line by line, recording descriptive, linguistic, and conceptual comments on participants’ language, meaning, and context.The exploratory notes were then transformed into concise experiential statements that captured the psychological essence of each noted section at a higher level of abstraction, while remaining closely tied to the participant’s original account.Experiential statements within each transcript were then examined for patterns of connection and clustered into Personal Experiential Themes (PETs), reflecting both participants’ lived experience and the institutional and structural patterns that surfaced within the same accounts.PETs across transcripts were then compared, and a list of Group Experiential Themes (GETs) and their constituent sub-themes was produced independently by the first author (A.R.B.S.) and the second author (R.S.), supporting interpretative dialogue and consideration of alternative readings rather than establishing a single objectively correct interpretation. The GETs and sub-themes were subsequently refined and modified by the third author (R.H.), before being agreed upon and finalised by the full author team.

The goal throughout was to ensure that the analysis matched participants’ accounts, with each interpretive claim justified by the data.

Consistent with IPA’s idiographic commitment, each participant’s account was analysed in depth as a standalone case before cross case comparison. This was conducted manually rather than using qualitative analysis software. This reflects our preference for close reading of each transcript rather than any settled IPA convention against such software, since its use remains a matter of ongoing debate in the field, and, in any case, such tools support data management rather than undertake the interpretative analysis itself.

No fixed codebook was produced, as IPA does not proceed by a coding frame.

Data Sufficiency

Sample sufficiency in IPA is determined by the depth and richness of analysis rather than a fixed numerical threshold.31 This study did not fix a minimum sample size in advance but relied on an in situ, researcher led judgement of adequacy, consistent with the principle that sample sufficiency in qualitative research reflects the information power of the data relative to the research question rather than numerical thresholds alone.33

Researcher Reflexivity

The interviews were conducted by two researchers: the first author (A.R.B.S.), a male Senior Lead Researcher at a private university holding a Doctorate in Business Administration (DBA) and a Master’s in E-Commerce, with training in qualitative analysis and theme generation. He has extensive experience teaching qualitative research methodology at the Master’s and Doctoral level, and has supervised and examined doctoral qualitative studies. The second author (R.S.), a male lecturer holding a PhD degree in Education, has published qualitative research studies and lectures in research methodology.

Neither researcher had a pre-existing relationship with participants prior to recruitment. Participants were informed only of the study’s purpose and procedures, with no further personal information shared. Throughout the research process, the researchers maintained ongoing reflexivity regarding their own fore-conceptions, examining how personal and professional background, and familiarity with academic institutional structures, might shape engagement with participants and interpretation of their accounts, particularly given the researchers’ own position within academia.

This reflexivity supported rapport and contextual understanding while guarding against over-identification with participants’ experiences and against premature or assumption-driven interpretation. This is consistent with IPA’s recognition that researchers’ fore-conceptions inform rather than can be fully set aside from the interpretative encounter. This reflexive engagement was supported by a reflexive research diary maintained by the first author throughout data collection and analysis, in which assumptions, reactions, and emerging interpretive impressions were recorded after each interview and analytic session.

These entries were revisited during analysis to help distinguish participants’ own meaning-making from the researchers’ fore-conceptions and were discussed between the two authors as part of the collaborative theme development described above. This included the researchers’ initial sense, informed by the literature, of a possible tension between professional authority and personal vulnerability (the sensitizing concept described in the Introduction). This was treated as a fore-conception to be reflexively examined during analysis rather than as an expectation to be confirmed, and accounts that complicated or diverged from it were retained and reported alongside shared patterns.

Trustworthiness

The quality of the analysis was evaluated primarily against criteria developed specifically for IPA research37,38 situated within broader principles for qualitative rigour.39 Sustained idiographic engagement was achieved through in-depth, case-by-case analysis of each transcript prior to cross-case comparison. Close attention was paid to participants’ own language and the cultural and institutional context of Malaysian academia. Interpretative depth was pursued by moving beyond description toward an account of what participants’ experiences meant to them, developed collaboratively.

Consistent with the analytic procedure described above, the first author (A.R.B.S.) and the second author (R.S.) each developed GETs independently across all transcripts, which were then refined by the third author (R.H.). In line with contemporary IPA guidance, this collaboration served interpretative dialogue and the consideration of alternative readings rather than inter-rater agreement; its purpose was to establish that the final account is credible and systematically grounded in the data, not that it is the only credible account.31 Close grounding of interpretations in participants’ accounts was maintained through a documented audit trail tracing the analysis from exploratory notes, through experiential statements and PETs, to GETs31 and through the extensive use of illustrative quotations. Attention to convergence and divergence was supported by the retention and reporting of disconfirming accounts alongside shared patterns across participants.

A compelling relationship between experiential material and interpretative claims was sought throughout, with each interpretive claim traceable back to the data from which it was developed, in direct correspondence with four markers of high-quality IPA (a compelling, unfolding narrative; a vigorous experiential and/or existential account; close analytic reading of participants’ words; and attention to convergence and divergence).37

Findings are presented as a single, integrated account in Analysis, in which themes concerning academicians’ lived experience and themes concerning the institutional and structural conditions they experienced as shaping that experience are read alongside one another rather than as separate strands. This integration is discussed in relation to what this study terms the paradox of vulnerability, the tension between academicians’ expected professional authority and their personal experience of mental health vulnerability, as it is evidenced in the themes that follow.

Ethical Considerations

Ethical approval was obtained from INTI International University Research Ethics Committee (Approval No. INTI-REC-FBC-235793) prior to data collection. All participants provided written informed consent to participate in the study and for the publication of anonymized findings, including interview quotations, after receiving information about the study’s purpose and their right to withdraw at any time.

Given the sensitivity of the topic, participants were assigned numbered participant IDs rather than named pseudonyms. All identifying details were removed from the transcripts and subsequent reporting. Participants’ academic roles were retained because these, rather than individual identities, were analytically relevant to the study.

Participants were also provided with information on relevant support services should they experience distress during or after the interview.

Analysis

Data analysis led to the development of six Group Experiential Themes (GETs). The findings can be outlined in terms of the following GETs (Table 3). The themes are (1) Normalisation of Chronic Overload as a Professional Standard, (2) Digital Intensification and the Collapse of Temporal Boundaries, (3) Erosion of Professional Confidence Amid Role Expansion, (4) “Will It Ever Stop?”: Living with Multiplying and Metric-Driven Demands, (5) “That’s the Job, Figure It Out”: Experiencing Leadership as Inconsistent and Unprotective, (6) Stigmatisation of Professional Vulnerability and Resulting Isolation.

Representative narratives from participants are directly quoted under their numbered participant IDs. Table 3Overview of the Group Experiential Themes (GETs) and Their Sub-ThemesGroup Experiential ThemeSub-Themes1. Normalisation of Chronic Overload as a Professional Standarda.

Blurred boundaries between work and personal lifeb. Resigned acceptance of overload as the professional baseline2. Digital Intensification and the Collapse of Temporal Boundariesa.

Collapse of availability boundariesb. Absence of regulatory boundaries around digital platforms3. Erosion of Professional Confidence Amid Role Expansiona.

Self-doubt through comparison with peersb. Gap between expert role and internal sense of competence4. “Will It Ever Stop?”: Living with Multiplying and Metric-Driven Demandsa.

Competing, multiplying role demandsb. Metric-and-ranking driven demands that displace substantive work5. “That’s the Job, Figure It Out”: Experiencing Leadership as Inconsistent and Unprotectivea.

Inconsistent leadership and policy directionb. Failure of role recognition and protective boundaries6. Stigmatisation of Professional Vulnerability and Resulting Isolationa.

Concealment as an unspoken professional normb. Vulnerability as a perceived threat to professional credibility

GET 1: The Normalisation of Chronic Overload as a Professional Standard

This GET described how the workload volume and racing pace of academic work had now come to be experienced not as an exceptional burden but as a normal working condition expected of an academician’s role. Participants described this not as a burden they were waiting to pass, but as the ordinary routine of their working lives, reaching into evenings, weekends and family time.

Sub-Theme 1.1: Blurred Boundaries Between Work and Personal Life

Notably, an early career researcher, Participant 2, with two years’ experience in academia, described the boundary between work and personal life as having effectively ceased to exist: Participant 2 (Lecturer): Honestly, there’s no clear point anymore where work ends and my own time begins [...] Only last Sunday, my off day, I was replying to a student’s Email at twelve midnight, in bed, and I didn’t give a second thought about it. Seemed normal to me. Suddenly it hit me.

It’s just... they’re all mixed up now, no separating work from my personal life.

Participant 2’s narrative is telling. Boundaries are not described as being crossed occasionally but as having dissolved (“they’re all mixed up now”), and his own admission that he “didn’t give a second thought” to replying at midnight suggests the erosion has become normalized to the point of being invisible to him in the moment; it is only in retrospect (“suddenly it hit me”) that the loss registers. That this account comes from an early-career academician, rather than someone worn down by decades in the role, suggests the erosion is not a slow accumulation of seniority-linked demands but something built into entry-level expectations of the role itself from the outset.

Participant 6 had a similar account. He experienced gradual displacement of personal space as his work scope and responsibilities widened, while Participant 9 described the structural mechanism behind it: Participant 9 (Associate Professor): My phone goes off and I already know it must be a WhatsApp group, a student, a colleague, whatever [...] Sometime back, I was able to leave the office at five and head back home. Now work is no longer limited to office hour…, it just follows back silently home.

Participant 9’s phrasing, that work “follows back silently home”, casts work as an intruding, uninvited presence in a space he once controlled. The word “silently” is notable. The incursion is not announced or negotiated, it simply happens, leaving him without an obvious moment at which to resist or push back.

This positions the erosion not as something academics passively allow, but as something that arrives through the infrastructure of digital communication itself. Participant 10 extended this further, to the scope of the role itself: Participant 10 (Senior Lecturer): I sat down one Sunday to plan my week and realised I couldn’t even list everything I was supposed to be doing [...] Our work seems to have no boundaries anymore, no real limits, it just keeps expanding until you can’t see the edges of it.

Participant 10’s image of a to-do list with no visible end (“you can’t see the edges of it”) marks a shift from a boundary being crossed to there being no boundary to locate in the first place. Unlike Participant 2 and Participant 9, who each describe a specific incursion into personal time, her account suggests the erosion has progressed to where the role itself no longer has a knowable limit. This makes the very idea of “protecting” personal time from work seem almost impossible.

For these participants, the boundary between work and personal life was experienced less as crossed than as dissolved, with technology felt as the medium through which work followed them home. A divergence emerged from Participant 7, who noted that this boundary problem improved following a change of employer, suggesting that the erosion may be institutionally shaped rather than inevitable. Unlike the accounts above, in which the erosion is described as a fixed, worsening feature of academic work itself, her account locates the change specifically in a particular employer’s expectations and practices rather than in the demands of the role itself, indicating that institution, not only the nature of academic work, shapes how this boundary is experienced.

Sub-Theme 1.2: Resigned Acceptance of Overload as the Professional Baseline

The second sub-theme shows how, for these participants, overload had come to be considered normal. Participant 7 captured the essence of this theme: Participant 7 (Senior Lecturer): There was this one Saturday, maybe two months ago, when I actually had three hours free and I sat with a paper properly, not skimming for a lit review [...] I remember thinking, when’s the last time I did this. That’s the thing I’m actually in love with, and there isn’t much time for it anymore.

Everything’s becomes routine, tick the box, move to the next thing.

Participant 7’s distinction between reading “properly” and merely “skimming for a lit review” separates depth of intellectual engagement from task requirements. Furthermore, her question, “when’s the last time I did this”, signals a temporal loss toward something central to her scholarly identity. Her closing description, “tick the box, move to the next thing”, reduces intellectual work to administrative completion.

Notably, she still names it as “the thing I’m actually in love with”: the passion has not disappeared, only the conditions that would let her act on it, giving the account a tone of resigned acceptance of the current work overload. Participant 4 echoed a similar sentiment, though tempered by his continued motivation: Participant 4 (Associate Professor): Last Thursday I had two thesis defenses back to back, then a faculty meeting that ran until seven [...] I remember sitting in my car afterwards, just staring at the steering wheel for a minute before I drove home. But I remind myself why I got into this.

I still love teaching, and honestly, that’s what keeps me going even on a day like that. I accept that this work loading is now a norm, not an exception.

The juxtaposition in Participant 4’s account is striking, the image of him sitting in his car, staring at the steering wheel, sits right beside his stated reason for continuing. This suggests the “reminder” he gives himself is not simply a source of resilience but an active piece of psychological work he performs in the moment, immediately after the depleting day, to make the overload bearable. His explicit naming of the load as “now a norm, not an exception” indicates he has come to expect no future relief.

Notably his passion for teaching persists alongside this acceptance rather than being displaced by it. This account diverges from the dominant pattern in this sample, in which overload is typically described as steadily eroding motivation. This raises the possibility that his passion functions mainly as a justification to keep going despite the overload.

However, this study notes it is also equally possible that having a strong vocational passion may act as a buffer against the perils of work overload, in which case the erosion documented in this GET may depend not only on the volume of work but on how central the depleted activity is to a person’s sense of purpose. Participant 6’s account offers a point of comparison, since he too once felt a comparable enthusiasm: Participant 6 (Senior Lecturer): When I first started, I was so excited, I’d stay late just because I wanted to [...] But somewhere along the way, as more work got piled on, I started dreading Mondays. That’s when I knew, this is not just tiredness, this is burnout.

Whichever way you see it, I have accepted this as part and parcel of my work.

Participant 6’s account traces a trajectory rather than a static state. His initial enthusiasm (“I’d stay late just because I wanted to”) gives way to dread of a specific, recurring point in the week (“dreading Mondays”), which he then explicitly reclassifies from ordinary tiredness into “burnout”. This shows a self-diagnosis he arrives at through the accumulation of these small, repeated dreads rather than through any single event.

His final phrase, “accepted this as part and parcel of my work”, signifies a significant experience, suggesting that by the time the erosion becomes severe enough, it has also become impossible for him to hold any expectation of change. Compared alongside Participant 4’s account, the divergence is clear, both men describe passion for the work as a starting point, but where Participant 4’s has persisted into the present tense, Participant 6’s belongs entirely to the past (“when I first started”), suggesting that initial work enthusiasm, once present in daily work, had become a thing of the past, which he linked to the workload.

Across these accounts, chronic overload was lived not as a temporary strain but as the ordinary condition of being an academician, alongside the erosion of personal boundaries. Most participants spoke of it with resignation, as an unavoidable feature of their profession with little expectation of change. Participant 4’s account is a notable exception to this pattern, and, following recent scholarly views37 that individual variation is analytically valuable rather than merely a departure to be explained away, we treat his persisting passion for teaching as a genuine point of divergence, suggesting that overload may erode motivation unevenly, depending on the strength of a participant’s vocational attachment, rather than uniformly across this sample.

GET 2: Digital Intensification and the Collapse of Temporal Boundaries

Extending the boundary erosion documented in GET 1, this GET vividly describes how academic work today went beyond formal working hours and into participants’ personal time due to the extended reach of digital technologies. Participants described how the boundaries of their working day had changed due to digital platforms with respect to their constant availability.

Sub-Theme 2.1: Collapse of Availability Boundaries

Participant 1 described how digital intensification had collapsed the boundary between work and personal availability: Participant 1 (Professor): My WhatsApp buzzed last night, almost at midnight. A student’s question about tomorrow’s planned presentation and how he was not ready [...] You know what I did? I replied it.

Because that’s how we are expected to be. We have to be available 24 hours, 7 days a week. Seems I cannot even switch off anymore [...] always expected to be on.

Participant 1’s account shows the request itself was minor, a student’s readiness question, but his explanation for why he replied, “because that’s how we are expected to be”, indicates the response was not a personal choice but a felt obligation he did not feel able to refuse, even close to midnight. Participant 9 described a similar collapse, but within his family life: Participant 9 (Associate Professor): Sometimes I don’t know what I got myself into. I am losing myself to work.

Just yesterday I was at my daughter’s birthday dinner. Quietly, I was replying to emails under the table [...] Whatever time you thought was yours, is not. Stressfully painful.

Work and personal life collide.

Participant 9’s image of replying to emails under the table during his daughter’s birthday dinner shows the boundary collapse is not only about volume of work but about divided attention in moments explicitly set aside for family; his own description of “losing myself to work” suggests he experiences this as an erosion of self rather than simply a scheduling conflict. Participant 10 further described the compulsion behind this availability: Participant 10 (Senior Lecturer): I was at my son’s annual sports event last month. The entire time I was reading a student’s thesis [...] I didn’t even leave my seat.

I just keep going at my work. Typing back one handed just to complete my work. Mind you it was my day off, Saturday.

With digital technologies we’re always on. Always available to whatever students or management needs us to do.

Participant 10’s detail that she did not leave her seat and typed “one handed” while reading a thesis during her son’s sports event shows a form of partial, divided presence rather than full absence from either activity. That this happened on what she calls “my day off, Saturday” indicates the collapse extends even into time she herself designates as protected. This further account names the specific mechanism behind the boundary collapse described above, not simply longer hours, but an inability to decline requests from multiple, simultaneous sources of demand stemming from the pervasive use of digital tools.

Sub-Theme 2.2: Absence of Regulatory Boundaries Around Digital Platforms

Participant 8 described the institutional gap underlying this collapse: Participant 8 (Senior Lecturer): I asked my Head of Program about our uni digital policy. All I got was a blank stare. I take this to mean that we make our own rules.

Rules indeed. We are all expected to reply to students’ WhatsApp queries lest they escalate into a complaint. Why can’t we have a proper digital usage policy.

That would give us some peace of mind in handling these incessant digital messages.

Participant 8’s description of being met with “a blank stare” when he raised the question of a digital usage policy shows the absence of governance is not a background condition but something he has actively tried, and failed, to have addressed. His conclusion that “we make our own rules” reframes the boundarylessness described in Sub-theme 2.1 as following from this institutional silence, as he experienced it, rather than an incidental side effect of technology itself. Participant 11, whose career spanned the pre-digital era, approached the same absence from a different vantage point.

He described the current scenario, whereby the younger generation of academics and students view pervasive digital availability as simply the norm. This was in stark contrast to his early academic years, where intrusion of digitally mediated communication was non-existent. During the interview, he summed this up as a structural deterioration: Participant 11 (Professor): Just 35 years ago, less was easier.

No midnight intrusions. No WhatsApp message that you had to reply. Work got done, issues got settled.

Today, it is completely different. The younger generation feels it’s a norm to be able to text us at any time. I feel universities need to step up.

Come out with a digital policy governing usage. Hey, I am not against technology. But there ought to be a limit.

Participant 11’s explicit disclaimer that he is “not against technology” but believes “there ought to be a limit” directs his concern precisely at the absence of a boundary rather than at digital tools themselves. His account echoes Participant 8’s account from an experienced, comparative viewpoint spanning both the pre-digital and current eras. His generational perspective reframes digital intensification as a structural, trend-level deterioration observed across a career, rather than a complaint specific to any one individual.

For these participants, digital intensification was experienced as an accelerant of both expanding demands and eroding boundaries and, in participants’ view, as pointing to the need for a digital usage policy.

GET 3: The Erosion of Professional Confidence Amid Role Expansion

The third GET described how participants’ confidence in their own competence had become seriously eroded with the widening scope of their academic role. This problem continued to exist even where they were continually regarded as subject-matter experts. For participants, this was felt less as a skills gap than as a private doubt about whether they were still the person the role assumed them to be, a doubt sharpened by comparison with peers.

Sub-Theme 3.1: Self-Doubt Through Comparison with Peers

Participant 4’s account illustrates an unconscious and constant comparison of his own work performance with his academic peers, one which left him with a persistent sense of inadequacy: Participant 4 (Associate Professor): While attending a faculty meeting last week, I overheard three of my younger colleagues chatting about some AI tool I’d never even heard of [...] Immediately, I felt this quick panic, like I’m falling behind and I should be adapting to all this new technology, or else I become something like some obsolete software.

His choice of an “obsolete software” metaphor is quite telling. He narrates his own professional worth in mechanical terms, tied to a version currency (akin to a software version), rather than to accumulated academic expertise. Participant 4’s panic was triggered by an overheard, informal conversation, not a formal evaluation, suggesting that his benchmark for competence is driven by peer comparison, so he can never be sure whether he is keeping up.

Participant 6’s account shows the same pattern. He measures his own workload and output against peers rather than against a fixed standard, which means there is no point at which he can feel simply “enough”. For these participants, distress appeared to be heightened when their competence was measured through constant comparison with peers rather than against any academic benchmark.

Sub-Theme 3.2: Gap Between Expert Role and Internal Sense of Competence

Participant 1 described the gap between the expertise expected of him and his private experience in his own words: Participant 1 (Professor): Students come to my office, hoping to meet an expert, a walking library who somehow has all the answers and solutions for them [...] What they cannot see is me going home completely drained, emotionally barely holding it together. Outside we look strong, but inside, a lot of us are weak. On some days, I even doubt my own competence, do I have what it takes to do this job and advise those who come to me.

Participant 1 describes his reduced function as “a walking library”, a professional role he is expected to perform rather than a person exercising judgment. This gap between meeting that expectation and going home “completely drained” suggests the performed identity and the person underneath it are experienced as genuinely separate. Participant 1’s phrase “outside we look strong, but inside, a lot of us are weak” addresses the split directly whereby the competence others see is maintained while a private sense of doubt persists underneath.

This is not simple modesty, since he goes on to genuinely question whether he is capable of the job at all, showing the gap between appearance and self-belief is a lived source of strain, not a fleeting worry that will pass. Participant 2 (Lecturer): I remember some time back submitting an academic article, reading it a few times before I sent it. I just sat there thinking, is this piece of work good enough [...] I genuinely at times feel like an imposter.

Whatever I write, it feels not good enough, like I’m not reaching the standard I’m supposed to. I feel pressured internally and my chest tightens at times thinking of this.

Participant 2’s description of a tightening chest shows the doubt is not only cognitive but physically felt. That the same doubt appears in his account, only two years into his career, as it does in Participant 1’s after many more years, raises the possibility that this gap between how competent one is expected to be and how competent one feels does not simply close with experience, although two accounts from a cross-sectional sample cannot establish this. Participant 9 extended this insight further from a leadership perspective: Participant 9 (Associate Professor): My phone buzzed on Saturday because of a budget and financial issue that honestly wasn’t even my area of expertise [...] But that’s the expectation, you’re supposed to step up and find a solution and fix every problem in the faculty.

Whether you actually have the knowledge or expertise, nobody really cares or asks. But imagine how we feel…choked and pressured.

Participant 9’s account shifts the source of the pressure outward whereby he is expected to resolve a problem outside his expertise simply because of his position, with no one asking whether he actually has the relevant knowledge. This suggests the competence gap was not only something he felt privately but something he experienced the institution as actively producing, by assigning responsibility for problems regardless of whether the person is equipped to handle them.

Taken together, these accounts suggest that participants experienced the expansion of the academic role as opening a persistent gap between how competent participants were expected to be and how competent they felt, a gap that operated at both the individual and institutional level. Participants described this gap as contributing to their anxiety and mental distress.

GET 4: “Will It Ever Stop?”: Living with Multiplying and Metric-Driven Demands

This GET described how the structural demands of the academic role, rather than any single overwhelming task, were experienced by participants as a source of sustained pressure. Participants described these demands as open-ended and competing, and as gradually shifting what counted as worthwhile academic work.

Sub-Theme 4.1: Competing, Multiplying Role Demands

This sub-theme, competing, multiplying role demands related how the unrealistic workload placed on academics coupled with a number of competing roles levelled untold pressure on academicians. Participant 6 identified this structural issue: Participant 6 (Senior Lecturer): I had a research grant application, few supervisory meetings, and a research report all due at the end of the month [...] I vividly remember sitting alone at the office at eleven at night thinking, which one to attempt first. It’s unrealistic how we are expected to complete all these tasks and keep calm.

Participant 6’s dilemma is not about the size of any one task but about their simultaneous deadlines leaving no way to sequence them without failing at least one. His late-night image of sitting alone weighing which to attempt first shows the paralysis this creates whereby the stress comes from an impossible prioritization problem, not from any single demand. Similarly, Participant 3 gave her own account from her own experience of juggling multiple university level roles at the same time.

She exclaimed emphatically: Participant 3 (Senior Lecturer): I seem to wear different hats in a day, some days are more difficult than others [...] Supervisor, conference committee member, research track leader, this list can go on. Juggling all these roles requires superhuman effort. It puts lot of pressure on me, some days I feel a squeeze on my chest.

I am stressed out. Will it ever stop? However, inside me, I still feel that motivation.

Participant 3’s account is more complex, although she described herself as “stressed out”, she also spoke of sustaining her motivation and drive, suggesting that strain and commitment can coexist rather than one displacing the other. Participant 5 likewise described sustaining his motivation despite the excessive workload and pressure.

Sub-Theme 4.2: Metric-and-Ranking Driven Demands that Displace Substantive Work

The metric-and-ranking driven demands sub-theme stands out because participants described it as a comparatively recent shift in what academic work rewards. This sub-theme is built around metrics and rankings, which participants described as displacing core academic work. Participant 11 located this issue explicitly: Participant 11 (Professor): Last week I almost jolted out of my seat during a promotions committee meeting.

I saw firsthand how a strong application with years of dedicated hard work got sidelined in favour of a rather unimpressive applicant. It seemed that this rather younger applicant was much favoured as he was publishing in obscure journals that somehow had higher quartile ranking. It was stressful for me to sit 2 hours in these meetings.

Is this the future direction of higher education, I ask myself.

Participant 11 frames his reaction physically, nearly jolting out of his seat, at watching a colleague’s genuine scholarly contribution lose out to someone gaming journal metrics. His response reads less as professional disagreement than as a challenge to his own sense of what the job is supposed to reward, prompting him to question the field’s direction rather than simply the outcome of one meeting. Participant 7 described the same issue: Participant 7 (Senior Lecturer): It’s just an obsession with ranking madness.

I remember that last month, I had carefully prepared an article for submission with good substantive research work. My department head asked why I wasn’t submitting to a higher ranked journal instead. Nobody cares about the body of knowledge and its fundamental contribution.

Today’s ranking madness and obsession drives everything. All snowballs inside us with more stress building inside us.

Participant 7’s phrase “ranking madness” and her department head’s redirection away from substantive work toward a “higher ranked journal” show the same shift Participant 11 describes, but from the inside: the demand to optimize for rankings arrives as direct pressure on her own choices, not just as something she observes happening to others. In both accounts, stress builds not from the workload itself but from watching the basis of professional worth shift from the quality of the work to its placement. Participant 10 made this mechanism explicit in relation to her own wellbeing: Participant 10 (Senior Lecturer): I find nowadays that I am consistently checking my KPI dashboard more than I check on my own wellbeing, to be honest [...] My health is getting affected.

All these KPIs and performance targets keep pushing us to the edge…not enough rest and more work like a never ending winding road without a stop.

Participant 10’s admission that she checks her KPI dashboard more than she checks on her own wellbeing reverses the expected order of priority. She places institutional metrics ahead of her own health in her daily attention. This suggests the evaluation system has not just added pressure but has begun to reorganize what she attends to day to day, displacing self-care rather than simply competing with it for time.

Interesting divergent viewpoints were also expressed by Participant 3 and Participant 5, both of whom described sustaining their motivation and drive despite the excessive workload and pressure.

In these participants’ accounts, the demands placed on them were experienced not only as excessive in volume but as actively restructured by metric and ranking-driven evaluation systems, which participants saw as redirecting effort away from substantive scholarly work and toward strategic performance for its own sake.

GET 5: “That’s the Job, Figure It Out”: Experiencing Leadership as Inconsistent and Unprotective

This GET described how the behaviour of institutional leadership, and the absence of consistent policy, shaped participants’ experience of stress and unsupported vulnerability. Participants described turning to their institution for steadiness or protection and, in several accounts, finding neither.

Sub-Theme 5.1: Inconsistent Leadership and Policy Direction

Where GET 4 revealed workload demands, this theme points directly to institutional culture and leadership as an institutional condition participants experienced as contributing to their mental health difficulties. The first strand was inconsistency in leadership. Participant 5 described this directly: Participant 5 (Professor): In just the last two years I think we’ve had three different versions of the same promotion policy.

It’s this rapid, frequent change in leadership decisions, procedures, whatever gets decided this semester might not even apply by the next one.

Participant 8 encountered the same instability from a different angle, across institutions rather than over time: Participant 8 (Senior Lecturer): I called a colleague at another university once just to compare notes, and our policies were completely different [...] Why can’t we all have just one policy that we can all follow. Won’t that make our work and life easier. I thought when I entered the academic field from the industry, the governance would be more systematic.

Turns out to be the opposite. Policies are different and that makes things stressful.

Participant 5’s detail that three policy versions appeared in two years, with each semester’s rule potentially void by the next, shows the instability is not a one-off change but its own recurring pattern, so no version of the policy exists long enough to become reliable. Participant 8’s comparison with a completely different policy at another university adds a second dimension to this, the problem is not only that policy shifts over time, but that it also varies by location. For Participant 6, this instability was felt as anticipatory worry: Participant 6 (Senior Lecturer): Every time, I hear there is a change in top management, I get worried [...] New management means new targets.

This makes me worry incessantly. I think my bp went up a few bars.

Participant 6’s worry is triggered by hearing that a management change has occurred, before any new policy has actually been announced. This suggests the anticipation of unpredictable change is itself the stressor, independent of what the change eventually turns out to be. His passing mention of his blood pressure indicates this anticipatory worry has affected his physical wellbeing, not just a fleeting reaction.

Sub-Theme 5.2: Failure of Role Recognition and Protective Boundaries

Secondly, this study revealed a failure of role recognition and boundaries. Participant 9 described this from a leadership perspective: Participant 9 (Associate Professor): Employers expect me to be solving all problems, most often, they don’t care if you have the expertise or not.

Participant 9’s observation that his employer does not check whether he has the relevant expertise echoes his earlier account of being assigned problems outside his competence (Sub-theme 3.2), but here reframes that pattern as a leadership failure rather than simply an uneven workload whereby no one in a position of authority feels obliged to match the task to the person capable of doing it.

Participant 12 recalled a specific moment in which that absence of protection became personal: Participant 12 (Lecturer): I went to my head of department in my second year here, genuinely struggling, and he just said, that’s the job, figure it out [...] I remember walking out of that office and just standing in the stairwell for a minute. If I could say one thing to the people above us, it would be, please be fair with your staff, take responsibility, and actually fight for the rights of the people doing the work.

Participant 12’s account is centred in a specific remembered moment, standing in the stairwell after being told to “figure it out”, rather than a general complaint, and her explicit request that leaders “take responsibility” and “fight for the rights” of staff reframes leadership’s role as active advocacy, not merely staying out of the way. Participant 7 extended this into a claim about professional identity itself: Participant 7 (Senior Lecturer): I seem to forget what it even means to just be an academic in a university…sometimes. I am not an administrator, not a form filler.

Our role as academicians needs to be preserved and protected by the management. Don’t take away our essence as academicians. This one is on you the leaders.

Participant 7’s uncertainty about “what it even means to just be an academic” is a direct report of role confusion. Her further insistence that this identity be “preserved and protected by the management” places responsibility for resolving that confusion on institutional leadership rather than on her own adjustment to the role.

For these participants, institutional leadership was experienced as inconsistent in its direction and insufficiently protective. Participants described having to absorb the resulting uncertainty and role strain, which they experienced as culminating in work-induced stress.

Across GETs 4 and 5, participants described institutional demands as consistently outstripping the support available to them. The workload placed on academics was experienced not only as excessive but as structurally unrealistic. On the same note, leadership and institutional culture were experienced as failing to provide the protective environment that safeguards academics’ interests.

Taken together with GET 2’s account of eroding boundaries and GET 3’s account of eroding competence, these accounts describe an environment in which participants felt little relief was available, personally or institutionally, a condition that, as GET 6 shows, they had learned to face largely in silence.

GET 6: The Stigmatisation of Professional Vulnerability and Resulting Isolation

This GET described how participants experienced mental health vulnerability as something that had to be concealed in order to protect their professional credibility. Participants described not only staying silent, but noticing themselves doing so, at times in the very moment they began to speak.

Sub-Theme 6.1: Concealment as an Unspoken Professional Norm

Participant 6 described a workplace culture in which silence about his own mental health distress was shaped indirectly by how his peers appeared to manage their own struggles: Participant 6 (Senior Lecturer): I remember passing a colleague’s office last week, door open, he was laughing about something with a student. I thought, well he seems fine, so I didn’t say anything about how harrowing my week was. At the faculty, most of us manage our stress privately, and honestly, that just makes it harder for me to open up too, because everyone else seems okay.

Sometimes, I feel I am the only one facing some type of distress but I know deep down others too face it…no one wants to talk about it.

Participant 6 never confirms whether his colleague was actually fine, only that he appeared fine from the doorway. He treats a brief, ordinary moment as evidence that everyone else is coping. His closing admission, that he suspects others are also struggling but no one says so, shows the silence is mutually reinforcing.

It suggests each person’s outward calm becomes the reason the next person stays quiet, even though it may not reflect what anyone actually feels. Participant 7 deepened this institutionally: Participant 7 (Senior Lecturer): There’s this one colleague, well known Professor who always seems so composed, she always has it together [...] It seems the more composed they are, the more I am unable to open up to them about how I feel inside and distressed. It’s like their composure makes my struggling feel embarrassing.

I know my colleagues will understand my problems, but I just feel I cannot open up of my problems to them.

Participant 7 describes composure in a colleague as something that makes her own struggle feel “embarrassing” by comparison, even though she believes that same colleague would understand if she spoke up. This gap, between trusting someone would respond with empathy and still being unable to disclose to them, suggests the barrier is not really about how colleagues would react, but about the discomfort of being the one to break the appearance of coping first.

Sub-Theme 6.2: Vulnerability as a Perceived Threat to Professional Credibility

Participants described vulnerability as a threat to their identity and reputation, something to be managed rather than expressed. Participant 1 recalled the moment he caught himself: Participant 1 (Professor): It was during a faculty meeting, when I started to say something about how tired and stressed I’d been feeling [...] And I immediately stopped myself. I knew instantly this was an admission of weakness.

I did not want that stigma, I don’t want to be seen mentally sick, or weak, not in this position.

Participant 1 catches himself mid-sentence, and his own explanation for stopping (not wanting to “be seen mentally sick, or weak”) shows the suppression is not accidental but a deliberate, practiced act of managing how he is perceived, consistent with Goffman’s account1 of concealing a discreditable identity. That this happens in a faculty meeting, a routine professional setting rather than a moment of crisis, suggests this self-censoring is a standing habit rather than an occasional response to acute distress. Participant 9 described a related experience, in which the cost of staying silent was felt in his workload rather than in a single moment: Participant 9 (Associate Professor): I tried explaining once that the management demands and timeline wasn’t realistic.

Sometimes they push us even harder knowing even when knowing it’s not possible. This makes us even more vulnerable, not less [...] But saying no, shows we are weak and not capable. So, I say yes to everything.

This piles more pressure on me.

Participant 9’s account shows a direct trade-off whereby raising a concern is read as weakness, so he agrees to demands he already knows are unrealistic, which then adds to the very pressure he was trying to raise in the first place. Saying yes does not resolve the problem; it only postpones and compounds it, while protecting his image of being capable in the moment. Together, these accounts suggest that participants concealed distress in order to protect their professional image.

Across the themes, participants described passion and motivation worn down amid overload, a sense of competence strained by expanding demands, and distress kept hidden within a professional and societal culture; in their accounts these experiences co-occur and relate closely to one another, although the data do not establish that they unfold as a fixed sequence. For these participants, vulnerability was experienced as a threat to professional credibility. It is this lived tension, between the competence participants felt required to display and the distress they kept private, that this study interprets as the paradox of vulnerability.

Discussion and Conclusion

Discussion

This study examined how academicians in Malaysian universities experience and make sense of their mental health within the demands of their professional academic role, using IPA. IPA was selected because it addresses, through a single integrated analytic process, an idiographic account of lived experience and participants’ own accounts of the institutional conditions they experienced as shaping that lived experience. These findings converge on a single unified account rather than two separate stories.

Two theoretical perspectives do the most interpretative work in what follows, the impostor phenomenon literature, which speaks directly to the erosion of confidence documented in GET 3, and stigma and disclosure theory, which speaks directly to the concealment documented in GET 6. The remaining theoretical literature cited below is drawn on more selectively, used to contextualize and illuminate the interpretation of findings grounded in participants’ experiential accounts, rather than to construct a further explanatory framework of its own.

The first theme concerned chronic overload normalised as a professional baseline. What stands out in participants’ accounts is less the volume of work than the resignation with which it was described: overload was no longer something to be waited out but the ordinary condition of being an academician, reaching into midnight emails, weekends and family occasions, and accepted as “part and parcel” of the work. Prior research has identified workload and lack of institutional support as key risk factors for academic distress,5,12 and a UK study describes academic roles expanding to the point of performing as a “jazz hands lecturer”.13 The present accounts add an experiential dimension to these findings, for these participants, the strain lay not only in the demands themselves but in coming to treat them as normal, so that even losing time for the work they loved was registered as routine rather than as a problem to be addressed.

These findings are also consistent with resource-based models of occupational stress, in which demands that outstrip available resources result in a gradual, progressive erosion of mental health.18,19 This pattern was not universal, however: Participant 4’s account of persisting passion for teaching despite comparable overload, discussed in the Analysis, suggests that the same structural conditions do not erode motivation uniformly. Rather than treating this account only as an exception to be set aside, we read it as suggesting that how overload is experienced may depend in part on how central the affected activity is to a participant’s sense of purpose; where that attachment is strong, as it was for Participant 4, the same demands appear to be absorbed into a person’s working identity rather than experienced purely as loss.18,19

Another key theme was the erosion of professional confidence (GET 3). Participant 1’s description of being expected to function as a “walking library” captures the tension at the center of this theme. Students expect him to hold all the answers, yet he described going home “completely drained,” privately uncertain whether he has “what it takes to do this job.” The expectation to embody expertise does not simply describe a role he occupies; it requires him to continually perform certainty in front of others while managing doubt in private, so that competence becomes something he must keep demonstrating rather than something he can rest on having already established.

This performance requirement also appears to sustain the concealment documented elsewhere in the findings because competence is judged by how consistently it is displayed. Any visible lapse risks being read as evidence the underlying expertise was never really there, which gives participants a direct motivation to keep private doubt separate from public performance. This theme critically engages with the impostor phenomenon literature, which has examined impostor feelings among faculty, particularly those who are untenured.14,15 In the present data, however, Participant 1, a professor with fifteen years’ experience, and Participant 2, an early career lecturer of two years, described a strikingly similar expert competence gap.

This similarity across a thirteen-year experience gap raises the possibility that the phenomenon is not confined to early career. Participants experienced it as compounded by a continuously rising standard of competence, which may persistently frustrate the basic psychological need for competence,24,25 although the cross-sectional design cannot establish whether it persists across an academic career. This is arguably this study’s most theoretically consequential finding, as it positions the impostor phenomenon in academia as closely bound up with the institutional conditions in which academics work, rather than as a purely individual psychological trait.

A further theme centers on the stigmatisation of vulnerability (GET 6). This theme finds support in past studies that have established that stigma inhibits disclosure and that psychological safety motivates it.2,16 These findings on participants’ disclosure of mental health issues are also consistent with the Disclosure Processes Model.27 However, the present findings extend further: Participant 7’s account of genuine peer empathy coexisting with continued silence around mental health suggests concealment operates collectively even where colleagues are privately sympathetic. This extends the sociological account of discreditable identity,1 suggesting that in this context the stigma is not merely managed individually but reproduced socially, regardless of private awareness that the underlying condition is shared.

The institutional and structural findings capture the institutional conditions within which participants experienced their distress as continuing. Unrealistic and internally incoherent performance demands, inconsistent institutional leadership and policy, and unmandated digital availability were identified as the three principal structural factors that participants experienced as linked to their distress. These findings are consistent with a sixteen country study which found that burnout is linked to job insecurity.12 They also align with a previous review’s observation that individual level interventions alone are insufficient without multilevel, culturally adapted institutional strategies.17 Notably, the divergence in these findings also mapped onto career stage whereby longer-serving academics such as Participant 5 described philosophical acceptance, while early and mid-career participants described more unmediated distress, suggesting that career stage may shape how participants experienced these structural conditions, without resolving the underlying strain they described.

This pattern is distinct from the finding that the expert competence gap itself appeared in both an early-career and a senior participant’s account.

Based on these findings, this study’s central theoretical contribution is a theoretically informed proposition, arising from the study rather than empirically demonstrated by it, that the paradox of vulnerability can be understood as a pattern connecting structural demand (stress burnout theory), motivational threat (motivation and impostor theory), concealed distress (stigma and disclosure theory), and, depending on institutional access, help seeking (help seeking theory). We use the term “paradox of vulnerability” as an interpretative conceptualisation of this pattern, arising from participants’ own accounts, rather than as a claim that it constitutes an established, validated psychological construct. We believe what this conceptualisation adds is not a new underlying mechanism but a single interpretative frame that holds professional identity, impostor feelings, stigma, concealment, and occupational stress together as one lived experience, in a population for which prior literature has typically examined these elements separately.

We return to the boundaries of this claim in the Limitations. Where prior literature has typically applied these four theoretical traditions separately, the present findings, drawn from the same participants describing related experiences, show relationships among the first three. We present these as a theoretically informed model for future research rather than as a demonstrated sequence, since the interviews show that these experiences co-occur and relate to one another without establishing that they unfold in a fixed temporal or causal order.

The fourth stage, help seeking, was not directly captured by the present data at all and is included here only as a further extension of the same proposition, for future empirical testing.28,29

Limitations and Future Research

Study limitations are defined as shortcomings within a research design that may affect the intended outcomes of a study. Three relevant limitations in this study are classified as methodological, analytical, and theoretical.

Methodological

Purposive sampling was used deliberately, consistent with IPA’s idiographic aims of participants’ own sense-making and the researcher’s interpretation of that sense-making, and is not itself treated as a limitation here. The relevant limitation is that data were collected at a single point in time. This cross-sectional, time-based design limits insight into whether certain themes, such as the expert competence gap, persist over an academic’s career or shift in response to specific triggers.

Self-selection around a private and sensitive topic may have introduced disclosure bias. Future research should adopt longitudinal designs across larger samples to track this development directly.

Analytical

In IPA, theme development is not intended to be researcher independent; the double hermeneutic, in which the researcher’s own interpretation is layered onto participants’ sense-making, is fundamental to the method rather than a limitation to be minimised. A different analytic team working from the same transcripts might reasonably foreground different themes or interpretive emphases; we see this as a feature of idiographic, interpretative engagement with participants’ accounts rather than a shortfall against a statistically established hierarchy of importance. The relevant methodological question is therefore not whether interpretation occurred, but whether it was transparent, reflexive, idiographically grounded, and compellingly supported by participants’ own accounts, which we have aimed to demonstrate throughout the findings through direct quotation and explicit interpretative reasoning.

Future research could, as one possible direction, triangulate these findings with quantitative instruments across larger samples to explore the prevalence and strength of the relationships identified qualitatively, though such triangulation would extend rather than be necessary to validate the present interpretative account.

Theoretical

This study acknowledges that the paradox of vulnerability is offered here as an interpretative conceptualisation, arising from these participants’ accounts and interpreted in dialogue with theories developed for other contexts, rather than as an established construct. Its boundaries and explanatory limits have not yet been tested outside this study. Future research could examine what, if anything, distinguishes it from related constructs such as the impostor phenomenon, stigma, and occupational stress, and whether it holds beyond this sample; only if such distinctiveness is shown would instrument development or hypothesis-driven designs become appropriate.

Conclusion

This study examined how academicians in Malaysian universities experience and make sense of their mental health within the demands of their professional academic role. IPA was applied to capture, from the same dataset, both academicians’ lived experience and the institutional and structural conditions they experienced as shaping that experience. Six Group Experiential Themes emerged.

They are chronic overload normalised as a professional baseline, digital intensification and the collapse of temporal boundaries, professional confidence eroded by an ever-escalating standard of competence, unrealistic and internally incoherent performance demands, inconsistent institutional leadership, and vulnerability stigmatised to the point of self-imposed silence. A notable finding showed that the expert competence gap surfaced in the account of an early-career lecturer as well as that of a senior professor. Almost identical language from a two-year lecturer and a fifteen-year professor raises the possibility that this is not simply a phase academics grow out of, though the cross-sectional design of this study cannot establish whether the competence gap persists or changes over an academic career.

Participants also located a significant source of their mental distress in institutional and structural conditions, which they experienced as rooted in the structure of their work rather than in themselves as individuals. Institutional demands were experienced as not only heavy but also internally incoherent. Participants pointed to multiple competing priorities that could not be satisfied simultaneously.

Participants described leadership inconsistency and unclear policy as compounding this. In addition, digital platforms were experienced as creating availability expectations without institutions ever formally mandating them.

Taken together, these findings converge on a single account. The distress academicians describe experiencing personally is closely bound up with the institutional conditions documented above. In participants’ accounts, the paradox of vulnerability was understood not as an unwillingness to disclose struggle, but as a response to surrounding systems they perceived as demanding the appearance of composure.

For these participants, this made acknowledging mental distress difficult, and concealment was understood as a rational, self-protective response to institutional conditions rather than a personal failing to be corrected at the individual level.

Implications

This study contributes to both theory and practice.

Theoretical Implications

Based on the IPA findings, this study produces three key theoretical contributions. First, it draws connections among stress burnout theory, motivational theory, and stigma disclosure theory, which prior literature has more often applied in isolation. We present these connections as a theoretically informed proposition rather than an empirically demonstrated sequence.

Structural, institution driven demands, motivational threat, and concealed distress relate to one another in the present data, but the interviews do not establish that one stage causes or temporally precedes the next. A plausible fourth stage, whereby concealed distress translates into help seeking behaviour only when institutional access allows and professional stigma is overcome, was not directly captured by the present data at all and is offered here as a further, theoretically motivated extension of the same proposition, for future empirical testing. Second, the expert competence gap appeared consistently across both early-career and senior academicians.

This raises questions about the assumption in the impostor phenomenon literature that such feelings resolve with experience, although the cross-sectional design cannot establish persistence across a career. Participants experienced these feelings as further intensified by an escalating and externally imposed standard of competence. Third, the study extends the stigma framework1 and the Disclosure Processes Model into a context where the concealed identity is not only a stigmatised trait but also the distress that contradicts a role built on projected competence and authority.

These findings also suggest that concealment can operate as a collective pattern, in some cases sustained even by colleagues who are privately sympathetic to one another’s distress, rather than being solely an individual coping choice.

Managerial Implications

The findings suggest implications for structural and institutional practice, arising from participants’ own accounts rather than demonstrated by this study as effective interventions. Participants’ distress was experienced as stemming from incoherent performance demands, inconsistent leadership and policy, unregulated digital availability, and a culture where disclosure is collectively suppressed even where colleagues are privately sympathetic to one another’s distress. Given this, participants’ accounts suggest that wellness seminars or workshops focused on individuals alone would be unlikely to address what they experienced as institutional in origin.

In light of participants’ experiences, this study suggests that universities consider reviewing whether their performance metrics are designed realistically, with academics’ mental wellbeing as a consideration. Clearly communicating policy frameworks, implementing digital boundary norms rather than relying on self-regulation, and building psychological safety into institutional culture are offered as implications consistent with what participants described needing, rather than as interventions this study has demonstrated to reduce mental distress amongst academicians.40