What graduate students experience in pursuing advanced degrees can leave them distinctly vulnerable to anxiety and depression, according to the results of a groundbreaking study of the graduate population at dozens of universities.
Students who have frequently suffered discrimination or weathered financial struggles are especially likely to exhibit high levels of anxiety and depression. Their choice of field also appears to play a big role: People in programs that are highly competitive, or that measure performance subjectively, were much more prone to show signs of such distress, the study found.
In graduate education, “the populations who are most likely to be suffering from depression and anxiety are also populations that are most likely to be marginalized in both higher education and society,” says the study’s author, Julie R. Posselt, an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California.
Universities “should consider how they prime students to face and make sense of the stress that graduate education entails,” says an unpublished paper summarizing her findings, which she was scheduled to present on Saturday at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education.
Ms. Posselt’s paper cautions that its findings show correlations, but not causal relationships, between anxiety or depression and various experiences students report having in graduate programs. Although being in a highly competitive program might leave students anxious or depressed, it also might be the case that being anxious or depressed leaves them more likely to describe their programs as highly competitive.
Nevertheless, her research represents the first major study of graduate students at multiple universities and in multiple fields, looking at the experiences and environments that appear associated with symptoms of depression or severe anxiety.
“It fills a big gap,” says Greg Eells, director of counseling and psychological services at Cornell University. Graduate programs will be able to use the study’s findings to examine their own cultures and the potential psychological impact.
Suffering Quietly
That graduate students suffer psychological distress is no secret. They commit suicide at higher rates than do undergraduates, with academic pressures tending to play a comparatively bigger role in their decisions to end their lives, according to Victor Schwartz, medical director of the Jed Foundation, which promotes emotional health and suicide prevention in such student populations.
Graduate students also are less likely than are undergraduates to avail themselves of the support services offered by a university, partly because they tend to live off campus and are relatively more focused on their specific academic departments than on the campus as a whole, says Dr. Schwartz, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at New York University’s School of Medicine.
In contrast to undergraduates, who have instructors in any number of fields whom they can ask for help when distressed, graduate students’ interactions with faculty members are much more limited to their own academic programs, and “it is way, way more difficult to disclose that you are struggling to someone whose recommendation might impact your future career opportunities,” Dr. Schwartz says.
It is way, way more difficult to disclose that you are struggling to someone whose recommendation might impact your future career opportunities.
Of the graduate students in Ms. Posselt’s analysis, more than 70 percent indicated that they would not speak with their adviser or other faculty members if mental-health problems were interfering with their academic performance.
Most research on student mental health in higher education is focused on undergraduates at four-year colleges. Among the larger studies, the National College Health Assessment, administered by the American College Health Association, surveys both undergraduate and graduate students but has separately reported its graduate data only in the past two years, too recent a period a convey trends over time.
In its spring 2016 survey, 13 percent of graduate students reported having a diagnosis of depression or having been treated by a professional for depression over the previous 12 months, and nearly 17 percent reported having been treated for anxiety. Nearly a third reported having at least once felt so depressed they had difficulty functioning.
Discrimination’s Toll
Ms. Posselt based her study on data from the Healthy Minds Study, an annual web-based survey of mental health. She analyzed information from nearly 21,000 graduate- and professional-school students at 69 universities surveyed during the period from 2007 to 2013. About 62 percent were in master’s programs, nearly 27 percent were in doctoral programs, and the rest were in either medical or law school.
The Healthy Minds Study checked students for symptoms of depression or anxiety disorders through widely used screening instruments that gauged, for example, how often they had recently felt hopeless, felt nervous, or found themselves unable to sleep.
The study also asked students questions related to their background, studies, family lives, financial situation, and daily routine. Ms. Posselt’s analysis of the data sought to isolate the relationship between various survey responses.
Among Ms. Posselt’s key findings, graduate and professional students who reported experiencing racial discrimination often over the past year were more than twice as likely to exhibit depression, and three times as likely to display anxiety, as were students who never reported experiencing it, all else held equal.
Having strong support from family members or friends reduced, but did not eliminate, their odds of showing signs of such emotional suffering. Being in classes they characterized as very competitive appeared associated with elevated risks of anxiety and depression.
Students who did not identify as heterosexual also showed higher risks of being anxious or depressed, although the study does not tease out the role that discrimination plays.
Money and Interests
The study found that money, or a lack thereof, also appeared to play a major role in graduate students’ emotional well-being. In the nearly 17 percent who reported their finances as “a struggle,” the odds of exhibiting anxiety or depression were, respectively, about three and two times as high as for the about 22 percent of students who said their finances were “not a problem.”
Ms. Posselt’s paper says its findings “suggest that lower mental-illness risks may be an underacknowledged dimension of racial and socioeconomic privilege in the graduate- and professional-student population.”
Lower mental-illness risks may be an underacknowledged dimension of racial and socioeconomic privilege.
As for the relationship between students’ choice of field and emotional health, three of four fields classified as having highly subjective definitions of excellence — the humanities, art, and architecture — stood out as having higher rates of both depression and anxiety. (The fourth such field was music.)
Students in the natural sciences had a relatively high risk of both depression and anxiety, while those in engineering, pharmacy, and information had a relatively high risk of depression alone, and those in law had a relatively high risk of anxiety alone.
Experts who examined Ms. Posselt’s paper cautioned that it is tough to establish causality when looking at the relationship between graduate programs and emotional health, because personality can play a role in shaping students’ academic interests.
“It probably is kind of a feedback loop,” Dr. Schwartz of New York University says. Students who go into the arts might tend to be “more in touch with their emotional lives,” which, he says, “is probably what makes them a good artist.”
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
