The educational aspects of graduate student roles can be particularly stressful for many people.Credit: Maya/Getty
Graduate students with anxiety and depression say their symptoms are exacerbated by the pressures of research and teaching, fueled by harsh criticism and being held to unreasonable expectations, survey finds .
Those who identified as having severe anxiety or depression were three to five times more likely to consider dropping out of their graduate programs than those with milder symptoms.
“If we’re about to lose some of the brightest minds because we’re not paying enough attention to how our programs affect their mental health, that should worry us,” says biology and education researcher Katelyn Cooper at Arizona State University in Tempe and last author of the study, published in November in Natural biotechnology1.
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Cooper and colleagues conducted 83 in-depth interviews with doctoral students at U.S. institutions who self-identify as having anxiety, depression, or both, to assess what aspects of research and teaching exacerbated their symptoms mental health and what alleviated them.
Information from these interviews was then used to create a self-selection survey, which was completed by 2,161 graduate students from 142 U.S. institutions. This investigation also explored what aspects of research and teaching exacerbated or alleviated symptoms, as well as how mental health symptoms affected students’ work and the likelihood that they would consider dropping out of their programs.
The study was motivated by a 2018 paper, also in Natural biotechnology2which found that graduate students were significantly more likely than their peers in the general population to report anxiety and depression. “This is a really ripe area to explore why this happens and why higher education can make people’s mental health worse,” says Carly Busch, lead author of the latest study and a biology-education researcher who now works at the University of Washington. in Seattle.
In terms of the research, respondents reported that negative reinforcement and unreasonable expectations had the greatest negative impact on their levels of anxiety and depression. In terms of teaching, lack of training and increased responsibilities have had the worst consequences. Overall, research had a greater exacerbating effect on graduate student mental health than teaching.
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This latest finding comes as no surprise to Gábor Kismihók, an education and labor market researcher who chairs the COST Action Researchers’ Mental Health Observatory, a European initiative aimed at addressing mental health issues in work-related environments. looking. “Being an academic or a researcher is a very strong identity,” he says. “But it’s precarious, because we don’t know what will come out of three, four or five years of work.”
Fueling uncertainty
“There were really a lot of problems with graduate school,” said a chemistry doctoral student from the northeastern United States who participated in the survey. She requested anonymity because she feared sharing her experiences would harm her career. “If I’m not depressed, then I have anxiety, and if I’m not anxious, I’m depressed,” she says.
She attributes many of her mental health symptoms to difficulties related to her research project. “Nothing was working was definitely the major problem,” she said. “I’m not making much progress, I’m not on track to graduate on time. And my ability to handle stress completely disappeared.
Survey respondents also said their anxiety caused them to avoid tasks, while depression led to a lack of motivation and focus. “Sometimes we think a student doesn’t care or doesn’t want to participate in the program,” Cooper says, referring to conclusions reached by herself and other principal investigators (PIs). “But maybe they really do have mental health issues, and what we’re seeing is a manifestation of some of those symptoms.” This is a great reminder for us to always take the time to ask a student what is going on and not make assumptions.