This paper aims at pointing out the way the agenda of activities in the academic world has led professors of public higher level education to sicken. The analysis was based on information gathered through a questionnaire applied to 98 professors of a Brazilian federal public university and interviews with 18 of them. The results demonstrate that the search for medical and/or psychological help is more frequent among professors who work in postgraduate programs, mainly women with a large number of advisees. The results also indicates that the diversity of activities — almost of them are mandatory, delimited and considered parameters for assessing individual and collective academic performance — is what seems to cause suffering and sickness among many of those professors.