Symptoms include: staring blankly at blinking cursors, over-researching fonts, and rearranging your desk for the fifth time this hour. It’s not fatal, but it might delay graduation until your advisor retires.
I’ve known lots of people who tell me they suffer from an incurable disease. It’s known as writer’s block. At typical student working on his dissertations would tell me when I asked, “Where is your first chapter, “Ray, it’s up here (points to his frontal lobe) but I can’t make go to the paper.” I’m a doctor, but not a medical one, and I’m not qualified to perform a lobotomy. Although I was tempted. I said, “How do you explain this phenomenon?” “I have writer’s block, Ray. I get excited about writing the first chapter, then I open my laptop and I sit and stare at the screen, my fingers refuse to move.” “Did you ask them to move?” “They won’t listen. I can’t control them?” “Who controls them? I ask. My student looked at me, “I don’t know, some invisible force that doesn’t want me to have a doctorate.” “Have you considered an exorcism, maybe finding members of an tribe to chant around you?” “You think that might work?” My head is starting to hurt. “Ray, why are you rubbing your temples? Will that help me?”