Grad School has become synonymous with having your mental health down the toilet. But, what is more dangerous is that this situation has become so normalized, people are practically blind to how serious it is.

To make this more concrete, I decided to list some statistics about graduate students’ mental health:

According to this source:

• 63% of graduate students feel overwhelming anxiety.
• 58% of graduate students feel very lonely.
• 45% of graduate students feel traumatized.
• 41% of graduate students fall into depression.
• 21% of PhD students have been bullied.
• 40% of graduate students are unsatisfied with their work-life balance.

To put this into perspective, according to this source, while about 7% of graduate students have suicidal thoughts, 0.15% is the equivalent rate in the general population. That is a whopping 46 times higher rate! Clearly, there is something messed up about this community. If you were told there is a city that experiences this kind of statistics, you would not want to be anywhere near it, and you would think whomever is running such a community is doing a pretty horrible job. But, sadly, once it is revealed that it is “just” graduate school, think look normal.

It is true that other professions do experience severe mental health problems. However, graduate school seems to uniquely combine such terrifying statistics with some of the lowest paychecks. According to another source,

[Grad students] are dedicating often over 60 hours a week towards performing cutting edge research and writing journal articles that will be used to garner millions of dollars in university research funding.

… graduate students are compensated for their work by a supervising professor, their salaries substantially lag what the open job market would offer to people with their qualifications…

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-emotional-toll-of-graduate-school/

So, basically, those of us who choose to pursue their passion get taxed severely for it, even though their objective market value is high. Somehow, all of this is viewed as “normal” and “it is the way things are”.

So, how can such a failing system be fixed? Well, most of these issues are stemming from the pressure exercised on students. Hence, it is reasonable to expect the administration to make the appropriate changes. For example, this source suggests we could have multiple advisors per student instead of one to minimize the odds of exploitation and overworking. It also suggests making graduation criteria more solidly defined instead of letting them be solely determined by one single person; the advisor. Also, according to this source, we clearly have inadequate mental health resources for graduate students. This needs to change since we know graduate students are 6 times more likely to fall into depression than the general population.

Finally, it is important that we, the graduate community, speak up and advocate for change. It is true we might not see these changes implemented during our time. But, like any fight for justice, it is a long journey to change a systematic injustice. Even if you and I don’t reap the benefits, our society will eventually, your kids or grand kids will, eventually.