Is jumping PhDs frowned upon? Long story short, I am a PhD student at a University and I want to leave and start a PhD somewhere else. I am in the process of applying right now.
I do not think it is super relevant to this question as to why I want to leave my present PhD education, but let's just say that is has economic, political and scientific reasons
economic - I am not getting paid enough to make ends meet,
political - my country is going down a dark path and I want to get out asap,
scientific - in all honesty, I am not interested in my current research to the point I am getting significant burnout from it and I don't want to risk getting stuck in this specific area  (I would imagine jumping ships for PhD is easier than for post-doc since before PhD most people don't do that much actual research) + my university is not super-prestigious and I hear that a lot of post-doc applications just get thrown out if you don't have a PhD from a top university

So anyways, anyone who does a search on my name will see that I am a PhD student at my present place and I don't even want to keep it a secret, I just want to know how likely it is for this to affect my impression negatively and whether I should mention this/go over the details as to why I want to leave in my motivation letter.
On the one hand, a PhD is basically a job and people leave jobs all the time, on the other hand, one can also view this as a kind of commitment to my group that I am breaking by leaving and thus I have no idea if this is frowned upon or even a common thing or not.
Seeing that someone is already a PhD student during the application process, or later seeing that someone was a PhD student at two different institution always raises questions. But these questions are easy to answer in your statement of purpose or later application documents, and being in a country that &quot;is going down a dark path and I want to get out asap&quot; is a perfectly good reason anyone will understand.
In other words, I would not worry about it: Whatever questions anyone might have, you have a good answer for it and, moreover, your own personal happiness/mental health is more important than anything else anyway. So do it, if you can!