Everything Is Fine: Dismantling the Myth of Academic Resilience

When I first entered the field of psychiatry, I quickly learned that my job title was a conversation killer at social gatherings. The sequence is almost always identical:

“What do you do?”
“I’m a doctor.”
“What kind?”
“A psychiatrist.”

The reaction is binary. Either the person immediately unloads a lifetime of trauma—marital collapse, medication woes, or family history—before I have even secured an appetizer, or they recoil, offering a nervous, defensive chuckle. “Are you analyzing me right now?” they ask, as if the title “psychiatrist” carries with it a psychic ability to perform pro-bono clinical assessments in the middle of a cocktail party.

Whether I am at a wedding, in an Uber, or navigating a dating app, the word “psychiatrist” acts as a lightning rod. I am either a receptacle for everyone’s suppressed problems or a personification of their deepest anxieties regarding mental health. For years, I assumed this was the unique burden of my profession. I even flirted with the idea of telling people I was an accountant—a career path famously devoid of follow-up questions.

Then, I became a Chief Wellness Officer (CWO) in higher education.

As it turns out, I had merely swapped one misunderstood label for another. “Chief Wellness Officer” creates a fresh category of confusion. To some, the term conjures images of lavender-scented candles, yoga mats, and an endless stream of smoothies. Others assume my role is to "deep breathe" them through systemic workplace failures, effectively serving as a human band-aid for institutional rot.

Hi, I’m Jessi. I’m not an accountant, and I’m not a yoga instructor. I am a psychiatrist and the Chief Wellness Officer for a five-campus university system. I work at the volatile intersection of people, culture, and institutional reality—a space where higher education’s long-standing failure to support its workforce has become a crisis of retention, morale, and human sustainability.

The Anatomy of "Fine": Deconstructing Academic Coping Mechanisms

This column, titled “Everything Is Fine,” is a nod to a familiar meme, a mousepad on my desk, and the single most pervasive coping mechanism in academia. When asked, “How are you?” the standard, reflexive answer is, “I’m fine.”

My favorite acronym for FINE is “feelings I’m not expressing.” When I share this in lectures, the audience laughs—a sharp, knowing sound that signals the recognition of a universal, albeit stifling, truth.

Naming this column “Everything Is Fine” is not a gesture of blind optimism. It is a subversion. It is an invitation to move past the performative stability that higher education demands of its staff, administrators, and faculty. We are currently trapped in a cycle of toxic positivity, where we praise the “hustle” and ignore the burnout. My goal is to use this space to dissect the structural issues within higher education—burnout, toxic leadership, and institutional inertia—not through mandatory training modules or sanitized corporate speak, but through evidence-based reality.

The Eight Dimensions of Wellness: Beyond the Stress Ball

To address the state of the academy, we must first address the myths surrounding what "wellness" actually entails.

Myth 1: Wellness is synonymous with Mental Health

While mental health is a massive, critical component of my work, it is not the entirety of it. Wellness is a holistic, multi-dimensional framework. As recognized by many institutional health models, wellness includes eight distinct dimensions—spiritual, financial, intellectual, environmental, physical, occupational, social, and emotional. When we focus only on counseling access or crisis response, we are practicing reactive medicine rather than systemic prevention.

Myth 2: Wellness is "Woo"

There is a prevailing sentiment in higher education that wellness initiatives are soft, unscientific, or purely performative. While a stress ball might provide a momentary reprieve during a particularly grueling committee meeting, it is not a strategy. True wellness work is grounded in data. It is inherently tied to organizational change. When we talk about wellness, we are talking about recruitment, retention, and the fundamental future of our institutions. If your employees are burnt out, they leave. If they leave, the institution fails. It is that simple.

Myth 3: The System Doesn’t Matter

The most dangerous myth is the idea that wellness is entirely an individual responsibility—that if you just practiced more mindfulness, you wouldn’t be so tired. The reality is that, in many cases, the system is the problem. Academia is not built to support humans; it is built to produce output, often at the expense of those doing the work.

We must hold two truths at once: first, the system requires radical, slow-moving change; second, people need functional, practical tools to survive the next week, the next semester, and the next meeting. We cannot wait for the ivory tower to dismantle itself before we start caring for the people living inside it.

The Human Cost: Data and Implications

The implications of ignoring institutional wellness are no longer abstract. Higher education is currently facing a "Great Resignation" of its own. Faculty are leaving for the private sector; staff are burning out at unprecedented rates; and administrators are struggling to bridge the gap between shrinking budgets and ballooning expectations.

When we force employees to live in a state of perpetual “fine-ness,” we are not just ignoring feelings—we are ignoring operational data. Productivity is not the same as performance. When people feel unseen and unheard, their institutional loyalty evaporates. They stop innovating. They stop mentoring students with genuine care. They simply check the boxes until they find the exit.

My approach is to treat the institution as the patient. This requires us to be "uncomfortable" on purpose. It requires us to admit that "fine" and "okay" are not, in fact, feelings. As Pixar’s Inside Out taught us, we need a more nuanced emotional vocabulary to survive the complexities of modern life. We need to reward authenticity over the performance of productivity.

Moving Toward a Culture of Real Talk

If this sounds heavy, it is. But my intention is to make the heavy things easier to talk about. I lean into sarcasm, pop culture, and the occasionally irreverent observation, because laughter is often the only way to process the absurdity of institutional bureaucracy.

We need to stop pretending that our current strategies are working. Pretending that the academy is thriving while its inhabitants are drowning is a failed strategy. It has never been effective, and it is certainly not effective now.

In this column, I will be pushing buttons. I will be asking uncomfortable questions. I will be advocating for the staff members who stay late to support students, the faculty who feel undervalued by the tenure system, and the administrators who are trying to lead while the floor is shifting beneath them.

The truth is, I’m not fine. You aren’t fine. And higher education definitely isn’t fine. But if we can stop the performance, drop the facade, and speak honestly about the reality of our workplaces, we might just find a way to get through it better together.

It is time to stop the charade. It is time to start the conversation.

Jessi Gold, MD, MS, is the Chief Wellness Officer at the University of Tennessee System and an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Tennessee Health Sciences. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and In Style. She is the author of the national best-selling book, "How Do You Feel? One Doctor’s Search for Humanity in Medicine."