CAREER NEWS 14 December 2021
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PhD students in the United Kingdom are more likely than other educated members of the general public to report symptoms of depression or anxiety, according to a survey.The researchers used common clinical screening questionnaires to measure signs of emotional distress in 3,352 self-selected PhD students and 1,256 working professionals; these all had undergraduate degrees and were similar in age to the students. The results were published on 9 December in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications1.The disparity between PhD students and the working professionals was evident at every level of severity. Twenty-one percent of PhD students and 15% of working professionals reported symptoms of moderately severe to severe depression in the nine-question patient-health questionnaire (PHQ-9). PhD students were twice as likely as working professionals (18% to 9%) to show signs of severe anxiety, as measured by the seven-item screening test for generalized anxiety disorder, a tool used by clinicians to identify people who might benefit from treatment.Overall, 71% of PhD students and 62% of working professionals who responded to the survey from April 2018 to November 2019 had experienced signs of at least mild depression. Seventy-four percent of PhD students and 62% of working professionals reported some level of anxiety.Stressed outThe results don’t prove that pursuing a PhD directly contributes to mental-health problems, says study co-author Clio Berry, a research psychologist at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, UK. Still, she says, there’s little doubt that life as a graduate student can be extremely stressful. ‘Year by year, PhD students are expected to do more and more to get their degree,’ she says. ‘They’re worried at the same time that the job market is shrinking.’This is not the first study to suggest that PhD students are more prone to mental-health issues than others are in the community. One 2017 study in Belgium found that PhD students were two to three times more likely than educated people in the general population to be at risk of experiencing depression, anxiety or some other mental-health disorder2.In the latest survey, only 32% of all respondents reported having been formally diagnosed with a mental-health problem at some point, suggesting that many PhD students who go through anxiety or depression aren’t seeking help. ‘If you’re a PhD student, do you want to admit to your adviser that you’re depressed?’ asks Gordon Feld, a neuroscientist who studies mental-health policy at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany. Feld says that some PhD students might worry that they won’t be supported if they tell others that they are struggling. ‘I have people in my group who have been courageous and talked to me about their issues,’ he says. ‘I know it’s not easy for people who suffer from a mental disorder to openly talk about it and seek out help.’Par for the courseThe survey also included questions that gauged attitudes about mental health. Thirty-six percent of PhD students said that they had ‘considered ending their PhD programme’ because of their mental health. Forty-two percent of PhD students agreed with the statement that ‘developing a mental-health problem during your PhD is the norm’.The narrative that mental-health problems are just a part of life for PhD students remains pervasive, Berry says. ‘It’s coming from peers. It’s coming from supervisors and the institutions themselves,’ she says. ‘[Mental-health problems] are sold as par for the course.’ Science careers and mental health ‘Suffering is seen as a badge of honour,’ says Cassie Hazell, lead author of the study and research psychologist at the University of Westminster in London. She worries that students who see anxiety and depression as inevitable might be less likely to seek help. ‘We need to normalize it a point to reduce stigma, but you don’t want to go too far.’Hazell notes that the rates of depression, anxiety and suicide risk among both groups were higher than seen in previous surveys, suggesting that people with mental-health problems might have been especially motivated to participate. Also, women outnumbered men in the study by roughly two to one, which might have skewed the results. The fact that the PhD students still showed more distress than the comparison group underscores the vulnerabilities of this population, she says.An analysis that combined the results of 16 previous studies involving a total of nearly 23,500 PhD students in North America, Australia, Europe and Asia estimated that 24% of all PhD students had ‘clinically significant signs of depression’3. In the same analysis, published in Scientific Reports in July 2021, 17% of more than 15,600 PhD students across 9 studies were estimated to have anxiety.Rates of anxiety and depression varied substantially from one study to another, partly because of differences in measurements and sampling techniques, says Emily Satinsky, lead author of the Scientific Reports paper and a PhD student in clinical psychology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. ‘There’s a need for more high-quality, vigorous research in this area,’ she says. ‘There also needs to be more research into the specific stressors that are driving the problem.’ She’s especially interested to see studies that track the mental-health impacts of the pandemic and the particular issues faced by ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ researchers and other under-represented groups.As a PhD student herself, Satinsky says she’s not surprised by the finding that students are especially vulnerable to mental-health problems. ‘It’s high stress and a lot of sleepless nights,’ she says. ‘I was told may times before starting that it’s a ton of work, but I think I underestimated it.’ 1.Hazell, C. M. et al. Humanit. Soc. Sci. Commun. 8, 305 (2021).Article Google Scholar 2.Levecque, K., Anseel, F., de Beuckelaer, A., van der Heyden, J. & Gisle, L. Res. Pol. 46, 868–879 (2017).PubMed Article Google Scholar 3.Satinsky, E. N. et al. Sci. Rep. 11, 14370 (2021).PubMed Article Google Scholar Download references
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03761-3
