Mental health in science
How Zoë Ayres has used social media for advocacy and to increase visibility
When Zoë Ayres decided to share a poster exploring mental health during a PhD as part of the 2019 Twitter #RSCPoster event, she wasn’t quite sure how the online chemistry community would respond.
‘I don’t know exactly what inspired me to go a bit off-piste and … make this poster about PhD mental health rather than make a poster about science,’ says Ayres, who is a senior scientist in the water industry, a member of the analytical division council for the Royal Society of Chemistry and a mental health advocate.
To her surprise this first foray into online mental health advocacy ‘really did kind of take off’. Ayres’ poster reached around half a million impressions on Twitter, sparking crucial conversations about wellbeing and mental health in academia. ‘[It] really gave me the confidence that people would actually engage with the conversation and would talk about mental health,’ explains Ayres. ‘There were people suffering in silence that were like, wow, you know, this is something that we should be talking about.’