The Atlantic - Graduate School Can Have Terrible Effects on People's Mental Health

[warblersrule]

@Twoin18

I wonder whether the isolation of doing a PhD is made worse if students are not in a serious relationship that gives them an alternative social outlet and source of support?

My SO and I got our PhDs at the same time. It was nice to have a source of support, yes, but writing our dissertations at the same time nearly sank our relationship. It’s an extremely stressful experience, and we were both perpetually on edge for that long, long year we were finishing our dissertations and going on the job market. We made it through, but I don’t miss grad school at all.

@juillet

But there has been research on this for a while, and I don’t think it’s far-fetched to say that graduate school - especially PhD programs - is a contributing factor to mental health problems and a causal factor in at least some cases. The estimates are that around 40-60% of doctoral students have experienced depression and/or anxiety before finishing; even if graduate programs did attract people with mental illnesses disproportionately, that number is still too high for that to account for all of it.

Yep. The mental health issues that grad students struggle with are no secret. Unfortunately, grad students often fear being stigmatized for going to counseling or admitting to struggling with depression. One woman in my cohort was encouraged (read: pushed) to take a year off when she told her advisor that she’d been going to counseling for mental health, which caused at least a couple others to stop going to counseling out of fear their advisors would do the same. Hardly the healthiest environment, needless to say.