Everyone who has gone to grad school knows this, but we also recognize that this study was executed by grad students who just wanted to get through the next few years.
A study of Swedish PhD candidates has shown the vast toll that doctoral studies can take on mental health. The survey adds robust data to discussions about the mental-health crisis in academia. Studies and anecdotal evidence have long shown that PhD students can experience immense pressure to publish and to find funding and jobs in a brutally competitive landscape.
The analysis looked at the rates at which all Swedish PhD students were prescribed psychiatric drugs and were hospitalized for mental-health problems. It found that, on average, the longer they were doing doctoral studies, the more they needed to access such services. By the fifth year of studies, the likelihood that PhD candidates needed mental-health medications had increased by 40%, compared with the year before study (see ‘PhD pressures’).
I’ll admit that I had a relatively easy time in grad school — I had a good, supportive advisor, and I got through the whole program in five years, and also got support for 3 more years after completion. I knew of other faculty who were absolute monsters, neglectful and cruel, though, and even with a good advisor I felt the pressure of that rising curve. It’s interesting how quickly the curve drops after the fifth year. I wonder whether that’s because they had adapted to cynicism and despair, or because they’d found positions. Grad school ends, you know, and it ends with a sudden increase in the intensity of the experience, culminating in a defense that cleanly completes the process. I remember the relief of finally finishing.
I do wonder how grad school compares to the life of normies, though. I suspect that that transition from trainee to the workforce is difficult for everyone. Except med students?
The study found that uptake in medication varied across academic fields. Those in natural sciences saw a 100% increase by the fifth year compared with pre-PhD levels, whereas those in the humanities and social sciences saw 40% and 50% increases, respectively. Medical students didn’t see any uptick in prescriptions.
That last sentence is just weird. I’ve known med students, and the stresses are enormous. Is it that the med students have access to the dispensary and the good drugs, or that there is so much pressure on them to conceal their stress?
I think this is a case where drawing parallels for the medical students between US and Swedish experience would end up being apples to oranges comparisons. The medical training regime in Sweden and many parts of Europe is quite different. You aren’t looking at graduating with the huge debt burdens, and then depending on the country you are going to move in to a public sector job with a salary and a pension.
This is why I wanted to time my PhD with my first Social Security check. Saw no sense in getting into that fight and the heartache it would bring. Came real close just need to finish my thesis.
The abscissa is not long enough to cover my personal experience
* cough cough *
Grad school is where I started to fall apart mentally. If I knew what mental health to look for at the time I would have looked for it. But by the time I got my diagnoses I was in shock and didn’t know what to do. It would be another 6 years or so before I find half-decent mental care.
I went through the stress of a masters degree several years ago. I did it part time so there was a lot of demand on my spare time. Fortunately I had a supportive employer who allowed me to do a lot of the lab work in their lab basically because my research project dovetailed nicely with a major project they had running. It also meant some of the fieldwork component could be supported by them. The final write up was 8 weeks of hell on long service leave but by then my son was at pre-school and I would start the day by spending the morning with him at school. It really got me in the mood to write in the afternoon and evenings. No pressure on to write papers just produce the dissertation which I completed and despatched on the day I was due to return to work. My thesis defence consisted of presenting a paper and poster at an international conference which I survived with some interesting feedback.
My PhD was a retirement project following a medical retirement. Very little stress just a lot of hard work thankfully with a supportive supervisor who sadly died before my thesis came back from the reviewers. There was a coursework component which I sailed through mostly with flying colours. The reviewers reports were positive with constructive suggestions for improvement and minor corrections saw me pass. Again there was no requirement to publish papers. That has now changed with requirements for three published papers per year and presentation at at least one conference. That takes all the fun out of it.
Grad School put me in the hospital twice. I have never recovered. The trauma altered my brain chemistry and an instilled outlook on life that i still struggle to escape. Grad school perched me permanently on the edge of what i call the abyss. I always counsel my students to think LONG and HARD about attending grad school, and ultimately try to talk them out of it. Unlike other disciplines an MFA (arts equivalent to PhD) fine art degree guarantees you nothing but heartache and debt. There are no longer tenured faculty positions for us. We are all (except for 2 exceptions in my entire graduate class) adjuncts teaching at 2-3 schools to pay the bills. Truly the only things i learned in grad school were success depended on who you knew, who you slept with, how much money you had, and if you were really fun at parties. My incoming grad photo student group consisted of 7 of us out of 300+ applicants. We were always reminded of how lucky we were and how easy it would be to be asked to leave the program. I called it the scorpions in a bottle grad school experience. The photo faculty kept shaking us up to see who would survive. One of our group quit the first month in. Another transferred to the sculpture program in the first year. When i finally went in to the school medical center sobbing and panicking before my first yearly review the doc took one look at me and asked if i was from the photo department. Then diagnosed me with clinical depression and prescribed me meds. Never been the same.
Oh, and i won every award that the grad school offered , was voted best student teacher a few times, and graduated with above a 4.0 (they gave + grades) And NONE OF IT WAS WORTH IT. What a fucking chump i was.
One of my favorite Larson cartoons is a kid in school, hand raised, who says, “Excuse me Mrs. Johnson, but my brain is full.”
I remember a moment in the middle of my thesis research writing a letter to my parents. As the Good Son I wrote once a week or so. While addressing the envelope I froze. I couldn’t remember my home address. Total blank. Parent’s name, city and state was all I could muster. I had to rummage through my trash can for their recent letter to find the return address.
It worried me enough that I took four weeks off, sat on the balcony in the sun and read romance novels.
Nawwwww! Just kidding! I was back in lab at 6:30 AM in spite of my brain being full.
So, should we change the saying from ‘publish or perish’ to ‘publish or medicate’?
Publish or perish AND medicate.
In chemistry, there used to be a problem with increasing numbers of grad student suicides during their PhD studies. One very “prestigious” university chem department, which I will not name, and in which the professors were known for brutality, was averaging one grad student suicide every five years.
One Nobel-prize winning chem professor in that department had three grad students in his group commit suicide over 14 years: he was beating the average.
This finally became too much even for chemists, and nationwide policies were quietly instituted in all departments to stop this (or, at least lower the death rate.) It seems to have worked, as no suicides have happened for some decades now, even for the professor whose students had been so prone to it.
Now the grad students just suffer mental health problems and almost-unbearable stress, but they at least live to finish their PhDs.
My grad school experience was a disaster from start to finish. I kept a roof over my head my first year by scrubbing toilets three days a week at some of those “rooms-by-the-hour” motels. When my advisor found out (there were apparently no academic jobs available–or I wasn’t “worthy” of one) he verbally ripped me apart because he hadn’t done his job of integrating me into his lab and making sure I was ok, which would have been the bare minimum. But,oh no, it was my fault. Then, at the end of my third year, my committee refused to approve my research because they decided to require me to hire 24-7 armed protection when I was in the field. I asked how I was going to afford that and one responded dismissively, “Just take it out of the principle.” (Transpired she was a trust fund baby and assumed all her students were too. No other faculty member on the committee was moved to dispute her assumption.) Note: poor and working class students, as well as women students, were routinely weeded out by the same means that had been used on me, I found out later. This was at a branch of the University of California in the late 80s. Doesn’t surprise me that this maltreatment would cause mental health issues. Also would not surprise me if it’s worse today.
Funnily enough my postgraduate years were among the most pleasant of my life. My undergraduate years were stressful, anxiety-ridden and lonely. My life since leaving University has been mildly stressful, about as anxiety-ridden and far more lonely, but for those few years I was doing my D.Phil. I felt about as relaxed and socially connected as I did growing up.
My one piece of advice to my daughter when she entered grad school was to pick her advisor carefully: get someone who is kind and seems human. She listened to me and seems to have come out of the experience relatively undamaged.
When I signed up for a PhD, I thought I had carefully selected my advisor: productive and consistent track record of publications in “hot” research fields, well connected both in Europe (where I am based) as well as in North-America and Asia, professor at a highly ranked university. I couldn’t have been more wrong. What really matters — as PZ has already pointed out — is an advisor who is kind, helpful and sees you as a human (rather than either a “paper machine” or “status symbol”). In any case, doing my PhD felt like hell: my advisor turned out to be a major league egoist and narcist, who was more or less constantly away until in my last year he completely relocated overseas without really spending a thought on what would happen to us PhD students. This, and getting as response to emails and work mostly total silence or a “it’s not sufficient” pretty much stressed me out. By the start of fourth year, I was depressed and burnt-out. In the end, I did graduate. But I also left academia, switched from Physics to software development and have never looked back.
I think the problem, at least in Europe, is that as a PhD student you are kind of in a no-man’s-land: There’s plenty of support for undergraduates who face difficult times, some for permanent university staff but next to none for PhD students. At least none which is familiar with your special situation. You are more or less on your own. And since you spend such a huge chunk of your time at university, your colleagues become your friends, which doesn’t really help in though times as they are most likely equally burnt out.
Anyhow, looking back — my defense was close to 15 years ago — there’s two things that remain from that time: I’ve made friends for a lifetime. We still do everything possible to meet about once or twice a year despite living hundreds of kilometers apart nowadays. And there’s a certain thankfulness of having a job with “sane” working hours and a much lower power imbalance than the advisor-PhD student relationship — I wouldn’t want to have a job again where quitting imposes a huge cost on you (in lost lifetime, in carrying the stigma of “having failed”), but not on your advisor.
My advisor seemed nice when I interviewed.
When I was struggling I got shamed about how he was struggling. He red into verbal errors like there was something wrong with me (it was fear, and common verbal error, transcription and translation). Asked me to do a basic chemistry math problem once to make sure I could. And was entirely unsupportive when I got the ADHD and tourette’s syndrome diagnoses. I was traumatized and no one thought I was worth supporting. I drifted into leaving with a Master’s.
OP–
I think med students, like most doctors, tend to be in denial about their own health needs. The psych med uptake may not change over time, but the suicide rate is much higher. Also, the career path is different. Immediately postgrad is extremely stressful as an intern then house officer, but at least you’re suddenly on a good wage. Certainly compared to science postgrads. And you’re not dependent on the whims of one supervisor for years.
Brony@16–
Currently struggling to complete a postgrad certificate in a field I enjoy and should be blitzing. IMO completing your Masters was a big achievement.
I was a lucky one in grad school, had a pretty good time. It’s running a business that sent me on the meds. Although I look back and as a little kid I suffered the same symptoms, so I’m hesitant to ascribe too much of it to my occupation.
That didn’t leave me blind to the fact that a huge fraction of my cohort were suffering, even with supportive advisors and a good financial setup etc.
And our department head was willfully ignoring it. She guessed maybe as many as 5% of students needed treatment. When we told her that surveys indicated over 20% were being treated, and many of the rest were hesitant to even seek treatment, she just denied it could be true.
Seeing the comments here I wonder why anyone would want to put themselves through grad school?