Harsh criticism and unreasonable expectations worsen PhD students’ mental health

Research and teaching pressures can exacerbate anxiety and depression, causing many young scientists to consider quitting, a survey finds

The teaching aspects of graduate-student roles can be particularly stressful for many people.Credit: Maya/Getty

Graduate students with anxiety and depression say that their symptoms are exacerbated by the pressures of research and teaching, fuelled by overly harsh criticism and being held to unreasonable expectations, a survey finds.

Those who self-identified as having severe anxiety or depression were three to five times more likely to consider leaving their graduate programmes than were those with milder symptoms.

“If we’re about to lose some of the best and brightest minds because we’re not paying enough attention to how our programmes affect their mental health, that should be concerning to us,” says Katelyn Cooper, a biology-education researcher at Arizona State University in Tempe and last author of the study, which was published in November in Nature Biotechnology¹.

Cooper and her colleagues conducted 83 in-depth interviews with PhD students at US institutions who self-identify as having anxiety, depression or both to evaluate what aspects of research and teaching exacerbated their mental-health symptoms, and what alleviated them.

Information from these interviews was then used to create a self-selecting survey, to which 2,161 graduate students at 142 US institutions responded. This survey also explored which 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 leaving their programmes.

The study was motivated by a 2018 paper, also in Nature Biotechnology², which found that graduate students were much more likely than their peers in the general population to report anxiety and depression. “It’s a really ripe area to explore why that’s happening and what is it about graduate school that can worsen people’s mental health,” says Carly Busch, lead author of the latest study and a biology-education researcher who is now at the University of Washington in Seattle.

When it comes to research, respondents reported that negative reinforcement and unreasonable expectations had the greatest detrimental impact on their levels of anxiety and depression. In terms of teaching, lack of training and increased responsibility had the worst impact. Overall, research had a greater exacerbating effect on graduate students’ mental health than did teaching.

This last finding was unsurprising to Gábor Kismihók, an education and labour-market researcher who chairs the Researcher Mental Health Observatory COST Action, a European initiative to address mental-health issues in research-related working environments. “Being an academic or a researcher is such a strong identity,” he says. “But it’s precarious, because you don’t know what will come out of your three, four or five years of work.”

Fuelling uncertainty

“Grad school really sparked a lot of problems,” says a chemistry PhD student in the northeastern United States who participated in the survey. She requested anonymity owing to concerns that sharing her experiences could 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 challenges with her research project. “Having nothing working was definitely the major issue,” she says. “I’m not making a lot of progress, I’m not on track to graduate on time. And my ability to deal with the stress is just completely gone.”

Survey respondents also reported that their anxiety caused them to avoid tasks, whereas depression caused a lack of motivation and focus. “Sometimes, we think a student doesn’t care or doesn’t want to be in the programme,” says Cooper, referring to conclusions drawn by herself and other principal investigators (PIs). “But maybe they’re really struggling with their mental health, and what we’re seeing is a manifestation of some of these symptoms. That’s a great reminder for us to always take the time to ask a student what’s going on and not make assumptions.”