after phd depression

Voices of Academia

Improving mental health in academia by giving you a voice., loss of identity: surviving post-phd depression by amy gaeta.

Completing the biggest achievement of my life has left me in the most zombie, emotionally depleted state of my life. Immediately after defending my dissertation successfully, thereby securing my Ph.D. in English, I found myself soft crying into a pillow and trying to find enough stability to reply to all the “congratulations!” text messages pinging on my phone. This emotional release marked the start of what I’ll refer to as my post-PhD depression: a state of aimlessness, premature cynicism, and loss sparked by the contradictory realization that it is all over and yet there is so much more to do. It is like finishing a marathon after giving all you got only to realize you’ve agreed to compete in a triathlon every day for the rest of your career.

Graduate Life

I knew that leaving graduate school would be difficult. I had structured my life around it for the past six years; relied upon it for various forms of emotional, logistical, and material support, including health insurance and an income. But, as anyone who has done it will tell you, grad school can also be hell. Researchers have demonstrated that students have similar challenging experiences at institutions around the world (Fogg, 2009; Keeler & Siegel, 2020). Many students report feeling overworked, underpaid, and invisible in the eyes of the university unless they can develop some research that bodes well for the institution. Even then, students often feel that are not truly valued. They see themselves as reduced to a flashy toy for the university to wave about. This experience is made even more difficult depending on factors such as your race, gender, class, and disability status. It is not an exaggeration to say that grad school can be a site of trauma, if not traumatic itself.

The mental turmoil experienced by a significant number of graduate students has gained much more attention in recent years, largely due to grad students and newly minted PhDs speaking out about their experiences. Less discussed is what happens to our mental health after grad school—post-PhD depression. The depression is certainly compounded by the collapsing job market and unrealistic demands of higher education, but is likely not caused by them (Fogg, 2009; Bekkouche, Schmid, & Carliner, 2022; Fernandez, 2019). Rather, I believe post-PhD depression stems from something deeper: a crisis of purpose, particularly the sense of loss that accompanies the end of a time of accomplishment and security. Our desire for purpose is human, and our purpose comes to shape who we are and how we are seen. If leaving grad school threatens our sense of purpose, that does not mean we need to find a new purpose. Rather, we need to interrogate why our sense of purpose—a determinant of who we are—is tethered to our position in an academic institution.

I am writing this blog post amid the height of this depressive episode with the hope of capturing the apathy and restlessness that accompanies it as I wallow in the grey area between grad school and academia. I also chose to write this now because I wanted to spare readers yet another narrative of inspiration or toxic resilience, or some other cliché that encourages people to tamper down their messy, ambivalent feelings and put on a happy, strong face.

Sacrifice & The Self

Many grad school students have spent anywhere from 3 to 12 years of their early adult years in higher education. It is common for people to attend grad school immediately after finishing their MA or undergrad degree, which they probably completed right after graduating high school. At the time of my writing this, I am 29 and for the first time in 25 years, I am not a student in an educational institution. I have few memories of myself before school. Without ignoring that such a robust, long education is a massive privilege resulting from my race, class, and social situation, being in school so long does things to one’s ability to cultivate a strong sense of self. ‘Student’ and later one’s research areas, become a convenient explanation and stand-in for who you are . Your professional development and academic successes motivate the formation of this identity, while, at the same time, every dose of imposter syndrome and minor setback feels like a personal failure.

Academic culture promotes and celebrates a full body and mind self-sacrifice to the academy, one that begins in grad school. Whereas undergrad is a more social journey bound up in coming-of-age tropes and questions about identity, grad school is more of a personal and intellectual journey, one that entrenches itself in your psyche and wears down your self-esteem like a stone sitting right before an endless motion of rough waves. Grad school is quite lonely. There is no time to engage in campus culture beyond your home department. You’re told that you’re there to work, professionalize, and research. Soon, your entire life becomes structured around earning a degree and swinging through all the hoops—conferences, teaching, research awards, guest lectures, etc.—that you’re told you also need to succeed. In my first semester, I was working, studying, writing, reading, or in classes for at least 70 hours a week. Precisely due to the consuming design of grad school and academia, having it suddenly end can leave one feeling lost at sea.

Because of the academy’s emphasis on productivity and structure, without grad school, I have been aimless. Not just “what am I going to do next” type-of-aimless, but “browse the cereal aisle at 11pm on a Tuesday” type-of-aimless. I cry a lot at tiny things. Each morning I wake up afraid at the prospect of how to get through the day. No hobby interests or fulfills me. I cannot access affordable mental health care because my health insurance ended immediately after graduation. People kept congratulating me and asking how I’m celebrating. I creak out a rehearsed monologue about ‘taking time for myself.’ While I want to celebrate this achievement, it is hard to look at it as an achievement after witnessing so many colleagues be pushed out of grad school due to the demands it put on their physical and mental health. I am proud of my Ph.D. I am not proud of what I allowed myself to go through to earn this degree.

In this state, I feel like I’m meeting a former version of myself for the first time in years. All the emotions, ideas, habits, desires, and fears that I repressed to survive grad school are now foaming at my mouth, emerging all at once like a geyser that’s been trapped by a glacier. I feel like I lost something, but the loss cannot be fully grasped or mourned. I also feel like I want something, but the desires cannot be fully wanted or realized. Any attempt to end my stay in this grey area is met with fear. At least fear is a feeling I can understand, something I can process and turn into knowledge.

How to Prepare

After years of mentoring younger grad students and reflecting on my own missteps, I’ve come to realize what I wish I did differently and that I could have better prepared myself. Healing from grad school brings challenges in its own right, like accessing mental health care or a stable, supportive home. But neither of these promises to soothe the real wound here—your relationship with academia and your relationship with yourself. To address these relationships, you need to make an active effort to learn who you are without academia. This is best done early on, something that you practice on a micro and macro level.

Ground yourself in multiple places . The first piece of advice I give to every new grad student is to make friends and hobbies outside of the university; ideally, these are each non-academic. In my experience, these are people and things that bring you joy and support your self-worth. The more you structure your life around grad school, the more power it has over you, and thus the harder the blow will be when you leave it.
De-romanticize grad school . Multiple things can be true at once. Grad school may offer you world-class learning resources and introduce you to some of the best friends you’ll ever make, but it will likely also put you in financial hardship and create mental distress at times. It can make and break you at once. Hold these contradictory images in the front of your mind. Once you have a clear, realistic image of grad school, you can begin to see your life without it, or at least, your value centered around it.
Return to what made you love your field . You were likely excited to go to grad school because you wanted to solve a problem, make a discovery, or push a research area to new heights. Is it not uncommon to have changed interests during grad school or to fall out of love with your thesis topic. You may even hate or resent it. Try to reclaim the joy or excitement that your research first brought you. Doing this will help you to remember yourself before grad school and recognize that you do not need an institution to learn and create.
Sit with difficult emotions . Let yourself cry, scream, throw things, cry some more, and whatever else wants to crawl out of you. Do this as much as possible. Find a place where you can express these emotions without judgment or forced positivity. No matter what anyone says, you are not ungrateful for having complicated or even negative feelings toward grad school and your Ph.D. I have personally found that repressing your emotions will ensure a breakdown or worse.
Leave your future open. Part of the misery comes from the pressure of trying to reach a future that may never materialize. I am not just talking about the academic job market or even a job at all. I am talking about how academic culture limits our imagination of the future by showing us a few pathways for how we can use our degrees and build a life. The more that you can see that the future remains wide open, the more that you can see graduating and aimlessness as forms of freedom.

I have no idea how long this will last or how it will end. A part of me wonders if this depression is covering up a greater fear: the exhaustion does not end. A professor of mine once said grad school would be the best deal you get in academia, and while I want this to be bullshit, the current state of the job market and neoliberalization of the university does not give me much hope that he is wrong. I figure then that what I can take comfort in is that I do and can exist beyond the university.

Reference List

Bekkouche, N. S., Schmid, R. F., & Carliner, S. (2022). ‘Simmering Pressure:’ How Systemic Stress Impacts Graduate Student Mental Health. Performance Improvement Quarterly , 34 (4), 547-572.

Fernandez, M., Sturts, J., Duffy, L. N., Larson, L. R., Gray, J., & Powell, G. M. (2019). Surviving and thriving in graduate school. SCHOLE: A Journal of Leisure Studies and Recreation Education , 34 (1), 3-15.

Fogg, P. (2009). Grad-school blues. Chronicle of higher education , 55 (24), B12-B16.

Dr. Amy Gaeta (she/they) is a scholar and poet of disability, gender, and technology. She is an incoming postdoc in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she is developing her first scholarly monograph. Broadly, her work focuses on questions about desire, ability, and the nature of the human in the context of high-tech militarization, medicine, and lifestyles. Her first chapbook The Andy Poems (2021) was published by Red Mare Press, and her second poetry book, Prosthetics & Other Organs is forthcoming on Dancing Girl Press. She regularly discusses all of this on Twitter @GaetaAmy

The Research Whisperer

Just like the thesis whisperer – but with more money, post-phd depression.

The author of this post has chosen to remain anonymous and they hope that sharing their post-PhD challenges will be helpful for others who may be going through the same things, or who are supporting those who are.

For those who mentor or manage Early Career Researchers, especially new postdocs, it may be useful to have this post’s perspective in the contextual mix.

———————

When I submitted my thesis, I was hit by post-submission blues, which I was already aware of. What I didn’t expect was that the cloud didn’t lift with completion and graduation. I pretended otherwise, but the moments of genuine excitement and happiness were fleeting. I felt confused and ashamed, compounding my emotions.

Wondering if anyone else had ever felt this way, I Googled it. It turns out that I’m not alone in experiencing post-PhD depression and it is a lot more common than I thought.

Alarmingly, I had never heard of it.

This post shines some light on post-PhD depression so that we can better prepare PhD candidates for life during and after completion and provide the best support that we can to graduates.

The PhD journey changes people

Even if your experience was overwhelmingly positive, a PhD changes people by virtue of its length and nature. Completion can trigger reflection on your experience. It takes time to understand and accept how you’ve changed; this can be confronting and surface as an identity crisis.

Sacrifices made might be a source of pride, grief, or both. You may struggle with poorer mental and/or physical health. Catching up with ‘normal life’ can be nice but also a constant reminder of what you missed.

Processing the emotional and mental impact of a PhD can be particularly confronting for those who faced trauma during their PhD (whether coincidentally and/or because of it). Candidates might have turned to coping mechanisms that have become unhealth, in hindsight. When life suddenly changes due to completion, trauma can surface, as can the reality of the mechanisms used to cope.

There’s a lot of good-byes

For most people, the lifestyle, environment, and relationships that are part of the PhD journey change significantly or come to an end along with the PhD itself. The loss of things you loved can be intense and overwhelming. It can take time to grieve and let go.

The future is uncertain

PhD candidates who submit and graduate are often asked, ‘What next?’.

The post-doctoral job market is highly competitive, and non-academic career pathways can be difficult to establish. Graduates – even if they know what they want to do next – can struggle to find a suitable position, especially if they are part of a marginalised group and/or are primary caregivers.

There can be a range of internal and external pressures shaping decisions. Graduates might apply for particular roles purely because they feel that is what is expected of them. They might suffer from imposter syndrome, and question whether their success was deserved, and whether they are capable of continuing to succeed (‘maybe I just got lucky’). Others might feel trapped in a particular pathway due to their life circumstances.

What can help

It can really help to know you’re not alone! Acknowledge and accept what you feel: your feelings are valid.

Be gentle with yourself. Adjusting to life post-PhD takes time and that’s ok. It can help to do other things that you enjoy, like hobbies and making the most of relationships with family and friends. Engage in ways that feel safe and are less triggering. Set goals to help give you the buzz of completing things but be aware that it’s normal to be underwhelmed by these when compared to a PhD thesis.

When you can, reflect on what you enjoyed most throughout your PhD and investigate how you can continue to do that. Perhaps you loved data analysis, writing, interviewing participants, or tutoring students. These are all skills which are used in other career pathways, such as business analytics and teaching – the specifics might be different, but the process is the same.

There will be a range of opportunities that might be available to you which aren’t immediately obvious – so don’t be afraid to ask people, from your personal and academic circles, to point them out.

Of course, that can all be easier said than done. Consider talking about what you are going through with trusted family and friends and seeking professional help where appropriate. It’s ok to ask for support.

How to help someone else struggling with post-PhD depression

It’s nice to congratulate people when they submit and complete their degree but be mindful that they might not be feeling excited. Allow this to inform how you interact with people throughout their PhD journey.

For example, consider avoiding directly asking what they’re doing next, as this can be triggering (even if well-intentioned). Instead, consider asking, ‘What are you looking forward to next?’ – it gives space for the graduate to answer however they are comfortable. If you have a closer relationship with the graduate, you could also ask, ‘What were the highlights of your journey?’ and ‘How can we support you during this next stage?’.

Consider being open about your own post-PhD experience, too. Even a casual remark can help de-stigmatise post-PhD depression. Something like ‘I realised after I finished that I actually really missed working in the laboratory, so much so that I decided to volunteer to do outreach in high schools’, for example.

If possible, don’t cut off support immediately, whether it’s at a personal, professional, or institutional level.

Most importantly, prevention is better than a cure. It helps to encourage a strong identity for doctoral researchers beyond academia, including maintaining connections with their family, friends, and hobbies. Supervisors and other doctoral support teams can help by openly discussing work-life balance and encouraging it for their researchers.

Take the time to learn about mental health and the PhD journey, and implement best practice for yourself, your colleagues, and for PhD candidates more generally. The ‘Managing you mental health during your PhD: A survival guide’ by Dr Zoë Ayres is a fantastic resource for candidates and academics (and it’s available through many university libraries for free).

A PhD is a life-changing journey culminating in an extraordinary accomplishment. Everyone’s journey is different, including completion and what life after may bring – and that’s ok. We can all benefit from learning to better support each other regardless of what our journeys and futures look like.

Managing While and Post-PhD Depression And Anxiety: PhD Student Survival Guide

Embarking on a PhD journey can be as challenging mentally as it is academically. With rising concerns about depression among PhD students, it’s essential to proactively address this issue. How to you manage, and combat depression during and after your PhD journey?

In this post, we explore the practical strategies to combat depression while pursuing doctoral studies.

From engaging in enriching activities outside academia to finding supportive networks, we describe a variety of approaches to help maintain mental well-being, ensuring that the journey towards academic excellence doesn’t come at the cost of your mental health.

How To Manage While and Post-Phd Depression

Why phd students are more likely to experience depression than other students.

The journey of a PhD student is often romanticised as one of intellectual rigour and eventual triumph.

However, beneath this veneer lies a stark reality: PhD students are notably more susceptible to experiencing depression and anxiety.

This can be unfortunately, quite normal in many PhD students’ journey, for several reasons:

Grinding Away, Alone

Imagine being a graduate student, where your day-to-day life is deeply entrenched in research activities. The pressure to consistently produce results and maintain productivity can be overwhelming.

For many, this translates into long hours of isolation, chipping away at one’s sense of wellbeing. The lack of social support, coupled with the solitary nature of research, often leads to feelings of isolation.

Mentors Not Helping Much

The relationship with a mentor can significantly affect depression levels among doctoral researchers. An overly critical mentor or one lacking in supportive guidance can exacerbate feelings of imposter syndrome.

Students often find themselves questioning their capabilities, feeling like they don’t belong in their research areas despite their achievements.

Nature Of Research Itself

Another critical factor is the nature of the research itself. Students in life sciences, for example, may deal with additional stressors unique to their field.

Specific aspects of research, such as the unpredictability of experiments or the ethical dilemmas inherent in some studies, can further contribute to anxiety and depression among PhD students.

Competition Within Grad School

Grad school’s competitive environment also plays a role. PhD students are constantly comparing their progress with peers, which can lead to a mental health crisis if they perceive themselves as falling behind.

This sense of constant competition, coupled with the fear of failure and the stigma around mental health, makes many hesitant to seek help for anxiety or depression.

How To Know If You Are Suffering From Depression While Studying PhD?

If there is one thing about depression, you often do not realise it creeping in. The unique pressures of grad school can subtly transform normal stress into something more insidious.

As a PhD student in academia, you’re often expected to maintain high productivity and engage deeply in your research activities. However, this intense focus can lead to isolation, a key factor contributing to depression and anxiety among doctoral students.

Changes in Emotional And Mental State

You might start noticing changes in your emotional and mental state. Feelings of imposter syndrome, where you constantly doubt your abilities despite evident successes, become frequent.

This is especially true in competitive environments like the Ivy League universities, where the bar is set high. These feelings are often exacerbated by the lack of positive reinforcement from mentors, making you feel like you don’t quite belong, no matter how hard you work.

Lack Of Pleasure From Previously Enjoyable Activities

In doctoral programs, the stressor of overwork is common, but when it leads to a consistent lack of interest or pleasure in activities you once enjoyed, it’s a red flag. This decline in enjoyment extends beyond one’s research and can pervade all aspects of life.

The high rates of depression among PhD students are alarming, yet many continue to suffer in silence, afraid to ask for help or reveal their depression due to the stigma associated with mental health issues in academia.

Losing Social Connections

Another sign is the deterioration of social connections. Graduate student mental health is significantly affected by social support and isolation.

You may find yourself withdrawing from friends and activities, preferring the solitude that ironically feeds into your sense of isolation.

Changes In Appetite And Weight

Changes in appetite and weight can be a significant indicator of depression. As they navigate the demanding PhD study, students might experience fluctuations in their eating habits.

Some may find themselves overeating as a coping mechanism, leading to weight gain. Others might lose their appetite altogether, resulting in noticeable weight loss.

These changes are not just about food; they reflect deeper emotional and mental states.

Such shifts in appetite and weight, especially if sudden or severe, warrant attention as they may signal underlying depression, a common issue in the high-stress environment of PhD studies.

Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms

PhD students grappling with depression often feel immense pressure to excel academically while battling isolation and imposter syndrome. Lacking adequate mental health support, some turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms like substance abuse. These may include:

Overeating,
And many more.

These provide temporary relief from overwhelming stress and emotional turmoil. However, such methods can exacerbate their mental health issues, creating a vicious cycle of dependency and further detachment from healthier coping strategies and support systems.

It’s essential for PhD students experiencing depression to recognise these signs and seek professional help. Resources like the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline are very helpful in this regard.

Suicidal Thoughts Or Attempts

Suicidal thoughts or attempts may sound extreme, but they can happen in PhD studies. This is because of the high-pressure environment of PhD studies.

Doctoral students, often grappling with intense academic demands, social isolation, and imposter syndrome, can be susceptible to severe mental health crises.

When the burden becomes unbearable, some may experience thoughts of self-harm or suicide as a way to escape their distress. These thoughts are a stark indicator of deep psychological distress and should never be ignored.

It’s crucial for academic institutions and support networks to provide robust mental health resources and create an environment where students feel safe to seek help and discuss their struggles openly.

How To Prevent From Depression During And After Ph.D?

A PhD student’s experience is often marked by high rates of depression, a concern echoed in studies from universities like the University of California and Arizona State University. If you are embarking on a PhD journey, make sure you are aware of the issue, and develop strategies to cope with the stress, so you do not end up with depression.

Engage With Activities Outside Academia

One effective strategy is engaging in activities outside academia. Diverse interests serve as a lifeline, breaking the monotony and stress of grad school. Some activities you can consider include:

Social gatherings.

These activities provide a crucial balance. For instance, some students highlighted the positive impact of adopting a pet, which not only offered companionship but also a reason to step outside and engage with the world.

Seek A Supportive Mentor

The role of a supportive mentor cannot be overstated. A mentor who adopts a ‘yes and’ approach rather than being overly critical can significantly boost a doctoral researcher’s morale.

This positive reinforcement fosters a healthier research environment, essential for good mental health.

Stay Active Physically

Physical exercise is another key element. Regular exercise has been shown to help cope with symptoms of moderate to severe depression. It’s a natural stress reliever, improving mood and enhancing overall wellbeing. Any physical workout can work here, including:

Brisk walking
Swimming, or
Gym sessions.

Seek Positive Environment

Importantly, the graduate program environment plays a critical role. Creating a community where students feel comfortable to reveal their depression or seek help is vital.

Whether it’s through formal support groups or informal peer networks, building a sense of belonging and understanding can mitigate feelings of isolation and imposter syndrome.

This may be important, especially in the earlier stage when you look and apply to universities study PhD . When possible, talk to past students and see how are the environment, and how supportive the university is.

Choose the right university with the right support ensures you keep depression at bay, and graduate on time too.

Remember You Have The Power

Lastly, acknowledging the power of choice is empowering. Understanding that continuing with a PhD is a choice, not an obligation. If things become too bad, there is always an option to seek a deferment, pause. You can also quit your studies too.

Work on fixing your mental state, and recover from depression first, before deciding again if you want to take on Ph.D studies again. There is no point continuing to push yourself, only to expose yourself to self-harm, and even suicide.

Wrapping Up: PhD Does Not Need To Ruin You

Combating depression during PhD studies requires a holistic approach. Engaging in diverse activities, seeking supportive mentors, staying physically active, choosing positive environments, and recognising one’s power to make choices are all crucial.

These strategies collectively contribute to a healthier mental state, reducing the risk of depression. Remember, prioritising your mental well-being is just as important as academic success. This helps to ensure you having a more fulfilling and sustainable journey through your PhD studies.

Dr Andrew Stapleton has a Masters and PhD in Chemistry from the UK and Australia. He has many years of research experience and has worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow and Associate at a number of Universities. Although having secured funding for his own research, he left academia to help others with his YouTube channel all about the inner workings of academia and how to make it work for you.

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‘You have to suffer for your PhD’: poor mental health among doctoral researchers – new research

Lecturer in Social Sciences, University of Westminster

Disclosure statement

Cassie Hazell has received funding from the Office for Students.

University of Westminster provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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PhD students are the future of research, innovation and teaching at universities and beyond – but this future is at risk. There are already indications from previous research that there is a mental health crisis brewing among PhD researchers.

My colleagues and I studied the mental health of PhD researchers in the UK and discovered that, compared with working professionals, PhD students were more likely to meet the criteria for clinical levels of depression and anxiety. They were also more likely to have significantly more severe symptoms than the working-professional control group.

We surveyed 3,352 PhD students, as well as 1,256 working professionals who served as a matched comparison group . We used the questionnaires used by NHS mental health services to assess several mental health symptoms.

More than 40% of PhD students met the criteria for moderate to severe depression or anxiety. In contrast, 32% of working professionals met these criteria for depression, and 26% for anxiety.

The groups reported an equally high risk of suicide. Between 33% and 35% of both PhD students and working professionals met the criteria for “suicide risk”. The figures for suicide risk might be so high because of the high rates of depression found in our sample.

We also asked PhD students what they thought about their own and their peers’ mental health. More than 40% of PhD students believed that experiencing a mental health problem during your PhD is the norm. A similar number (41%) told us that most of their PhD colleagues had mental health problems.

Just over a third of PhD students had considered ending their studies altogether for mental health reasons.

There is clearly a high prevalence of mental health problems among PhD students, beyond those rates seen in the general public. Our results indicate a problem with the current system of PhD study – or perhaps with academic more widely. Academia notoriously encourages a culture of overwork and under-appreciation.

This mindset is present among PhD students. In our focus groups and surveys for other research , PhD students reported wearing their suffering as a badge of honour and a marker that they are working hard enough rather than too much. One student told us :

“There is a common belief … you have to suffer for the sake of your PhD, if you aren’t anxious or suffering from impostor syndrome, then you aren’t doing it "properly”.

We explored the potential risk factors that could lead to poor mental health among PhD students and the things that could protect their mental health.

Financial insecurity was one risk factor. Not all researchers receive funding to cover their course and personal expenses, and once their PhD is complete, there is no guarantee of a job. The number of people studying for a PhD is increasing without an equivalent increase in postdoctoral positions .

Another risk factor was conflict in their relationship with their academic supervisor . An analogy offered by one of our PhD student collaborators likened the academic supervisor to a “sword” that you can use to defeat the “PhD monster”. If your weapon is ineffective, then it makes tackling the monster a difficult – if not impossible – task. Supervisor difficulties can take many forms. These can include a supervisor being inaccessible, overly critical or lacking expertise.

A lack of interests or relationships outside PhD study, or the presence of stressors in students’ personal lives were also risk factors.

We have also found an association between poor mental health and high levels of perfectionism, impostor syndrome (feeling like you don’t belong or deserve to be studying for your PhD) and the sense of being isolated .

Better conversations

Doctoral research is not all doom and gloom. There are many students who find studying for a PhD to be both enjoyable and fulfilling , and there are many examples of cooperative and nurturing research environments across academia.

Studying for a PhD is an opportunity for researchers to spend several years learning and exploring a topic they are passionate about. It is a training programme intended to equip students with the skills and expertise to further the world’s knowledge. These examples of good practice provide opportunities for us to learn about what works well and disseminate them more widely.

The wellbeing and mental health of PhD students is a subject that we must continue to talk about and reflect on. However, these conversations need to happen in a way that considers the evidence, offers balance, and avoids perpetuating unhelpful myths.

Indeed, in our own study, we found that the percentage of PhD students who believed their peers had mental health problems and that poor mental health was the norm, exceeded the rates of students who actually met diagnostic criteria for a common mental health problem . That is, PhD students may be overestimating the already high number of their peers who experienced mental health problems.

We therefore need to be careful about the messages we put out on this topic, as we may inadvertently make the situation worse. If messages are too negative, we may add to the myth that all PhD students experience mental health problems and help maintain the toxicity of academic culture.

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v.20(3); Fall 2021

PhDepression: Examining How Graduate Research and Teaching Affect Depression in Life Sciences PhD Students

Logan e. gin.

† Research for Inclusive STEM Education Center, School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85281

Nicholas J. Wiesenthal

§ Department of Biology, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816

Katelyn M. Cooper

Graduate students are more than six times as likely to experience depression compared with the general population. However, few studies have examined how graduate school specifically affects depression. In this qualitative interview study of 50 life sciences PhD students from 28 institutions, we examined how research and teaching affect depression in PhD students and how depression in turn affects students’ experiences teaching and researching. Using inductive coding, we identified factors that either positively or negatively affected student depression. Graduate students more commonly mentioned factors related to research that negatively affected their depression and factors related to teaching that positively affected their depression. We identified four overarching aspects of graduate school that influenced student depression: the amount of structure in teaching and research, positive and negative reinforcement, success and failure, and social support and isolation. Graduate students reported that depression had an exclusively negative effect on their research, primarily hindering their motivation and self-confidence, but that it helped them to be more compassionate teachers. This work pinpoints specific aspects of graduate school that PhD programs can target to improve mental health among life sciences graduate students.

INTRODUCTION

In 2018, researchers found that graduate students were more than six times as likely to report experiencing depression and anxiety compared with the general population and subsequently declared a “graduate student mental health crisis” ( Evans et al. , 2018 ; Flaherty, 2018 ). Calls to identify which factors exacerbate graduate student mental health problems followed (“The Mental Health of PhD Researchers,” 2019; Woolston, 2019a ). However, few studies have taken an inductive approach to identifying what aspects of graduate school in particular affect student mental health. More commonly, large quantitative studies propose a limited number of factors that may affect student mental health that participants select from, few of which directly relate to graduate research or teaching ( Peluso et al. , 2011 ; Levecque et al. , 2017 ; Evans et al. , 2018 ; Liu et al. , 2019 ). In this interview study, we focus on depression in life sciences PhD students and examine which specific aspects of research and teaching graduate students report as affecting their depression. We also explore how depression affects students’ experiences in graduate school.

The American Psychiatric Association defines depression as a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how one feels, the way one thinks, and how one acts ( American Psychiatric Association, 2020 ). Depression is characterized by nine symptoms: depressed mood; markedly diminished interest or pleasure in activities; reduced ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness; feelings of worthlessness, or excessive or inappropriate guilt; recurrent thoughts of death or suicidal ideation, or suicide attempts or plans; insomnia or hypersomnia; significant change in appetite or weight; psychomotor agitation or retardation; and fatigue or loss of energy ( American Psychiatric Association, 2013 ; Schmidt and Tolentino, 2018 ). For depression to be diagnosed, the presence of at least five of the symptoms is required most of the day, nearly every day, for at least 2 weeks in addition to the occurrence of either depressed mood or diminished interest or pleasure ( American Psychiatric Association, 2013 ). In the general U.S. population, depression affects approximately 6.7% of individuals and is estimated to affect 16.6% of individuals at some point in their lifetime.

Graduate students are far more likely to report experiencing depression compared with the general population ( Evans et al. , 2018 ; Barreira et al. , 2020 ). Specifically, a recent study of master’s and PhD students in programs across the world, spanning a variety of disciplines, found that 39% of graduate students reported having moderate to severe depression ( Evans et al. , 2018 ). Similar studies have demonstrated high rates of depression in graduate students in specific disciplines such as economics ( Barreira et al. , 2020 ), biochemistry ( Helmers et al. , 1997 ), pharmacology ( Helmers et al. , 1997 ), and physiology ( Helmers et al. , 1997 ). Depression rates have surged in recent years among graduate students ( American College Health Association, 2014 , 2019 ). Talking about depression has become more socially acceptable, particularly among younger adults ( Anxiety and Depression Association of America, 2015 ; Lipson et al. , 2019 ), which may have contributed to the number of students willing to reveal that they are struggling with mental health. Additionally, depression is highly related to burnout, defined as a work-related chronic stress syndrome involving emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment ( Maslach et al. , 2001 ; Bianchi et al. , 2014 ). Graduate work environments appear to be increasingly characterized as stressful and demanding ( American College Health Association, 2014 , 2019 ; Woolston, 2017 ), which may also be contributing to the increase in graduate depression rates.

Increasingly, scientists, psychologists, and education researchers are recognizing graduate student mental health as a concern and calling for further investigation of graduate student mental health in hopes of identifying interventions to improve graduate student quality of life (“The Mental Health of PhD Researchers,” 2019; Woolston, 2019a , b ). For example, in 2019, Nature added a question to its annual survey of PhD students asking students from around the world whether they had sought help for anxiety or depression, and more than one-third (36%) confirmed they had ( Woolston, 2019b ). Additionally, notable publication outlets such as Nature (“The Mental Health of PhD Researchers,” 2019), Scientific American ( Puri, 2019 ), and Science ( Pain, 2018 ) have published blogs or editorials spotlighting the need to improve graduate student mental health.

Some recent studies have sought to uncover the factors affecting depression in graduate students. Primarily, survey studies with predetermined factors that researchers hypothesized impact student mental health have identified poor mentor–mentee relationships ( Peluso et al. , 2011 ; Evans et al. , 2018 ; Hish et al. , 2019 ; Liu et al. , 2019 ; Charles et al. , 2021 ), financial stress ( Hish et al. , 2019 ; Jones-White et al. , 2020 ; Charles et al. , 2021 ), and lack of work–life balance ( Evans et al. , 2018 ; Liu et al. , 2019 ) to be associated with depression or depressive symptoms among graduate students in various disciplines. Other variables shown to be predictive of depression include low research self-efficacy, defined as low confidence in one’s ability to do research ( Liu et al. , 2019 ), difficulty publishing papers ( Liu et al. , 2019 ), hours worked per week ( Peluso et al. , 2011 ), and perceived institutional discrimination ( Charles et al. , 2021 ). Factors that appear to be protective of depressive symptoms include social support ( Charles et al. , 2021 ), mastery, defined as the extent to which individuals perceive themselves to be in control of the forces that impact their lives ( Hish et al. , 2019 ), positive departmental social climate ( Charles et al. , 2021 ), optimism about career prospects ( Charles et al. , 2021 ), and sense of belonging to one’s graduate program ( Jones-White et al. , 2020 ). While these studies have identified some depression-related factors associated with graduate school broadly and emphasize the importance of positive mentor–mentee relationships, few studies have explored factors specifically associated with research and teaching, the two activities that graduate students engage in most frequently during their time in a program. Additionally, the extant literature has primarily focused on surface causes of graduate student depression, yet understanding the underlying causes may be key to developing meaningful interventions. For example, while it is well established that student perception of poor mentorship is related to student depression ( Evans et al. , 2018 ; Hish et al. , 2019 ; Liu et al. , 2019 ; Charles et al. , 2021 ), it is less well understood what specific behaviors mentors exhibit and how such behaviors negatively affect the cognitive and behavioral underpinnings of graduate student depression. Without this knowledge, it is difficult to develop strategies to help mentors be more inclusive of students.

Theories of depression seek to explain the causes of depression. No theoretical model is widely accepted as an overarching framework for depression within the psychological and psychiatric communities ( Mcleod, 2015 ; Ramnerö et al. , 2016 ); instead, there are a number of models addressing how different aspects of depression are associated with the disorder. Arguably, the three most prominent models are cognitive ( Beck et al. , 1979 ), behavioral ( Martell et al. , 2001 ), and psychodynamic ( Busch et al. , 2016 ). In brief, cognitive theories focus on an individual’s beliefs and propose that changes in thinking precede depressive symptoms; for example, negative views of oneself, the world, and the future are thought to be common for individuals with depression ( Beck et al. , 1979 ; Leahy, 2002 ). Behavioral theories emphasize that depression is a result of one’s interaction with the environment; depressive symptoms are thought to be the result of decreased reward, lack of positive reinforcement, encouragement of depressive or passive behaviors, and discouragement of healthy behaviors ( Lewinsohn, 1974 ; Martell et al. , 2001 ; Carvalho et al. , 2011 ). Psychodynamic theories of depression consider the role of feelings and behaviors in the etiology and persistence of depressive symptoms; these theories often focus on 1) one’s biology and temperamental vulnerabilities, 2) earliest attachment relationships, and 3) childhood experiences associated with frustration, helplessness, loss, guilty, or loneliness ( Busch et al. , 2016 ). While each group of theories has been critiqued and no one theory fully explains one’s experience with depression ( Mcleod, 2015 ; Ramnerö et al. , 2016 ), we propose that each may be helpful in understanding how aspects of graduate school may affect depression among PhD students.

The thoughts and behaviors associated with depression may in turn affect students’ experiences in graduate school, particularly their experiences with research and teaching. While no studies have examined how depression explicitly affects graduate students’ research experiences, studies have identified ways in which depression can affect students’ experiences in undergraduate research ( Cooper et al. , 2020a , b ). Undergraduate researchers report that their depression negatively affected their motivation, ability to concentrate and remember, intellectual engagement, and creativity in research ( Cooper et al. , 2020b ). Undergraduates described that their depression also caused them to be overly self-critical, less social, and ultimately negatively affected their research productivity. Additionally, undergraduates have been reluctant to share their depression with others in the lab, because they fear that they will be judged ( Cooper et al. , 2020b ). While these studies provide some insight into how depression may affect graduate students’ experience in research, there is much less information about how depression may affect graduate teaching.

In this study, we interviewed 50 PhD students in the life sciences who self-identified with having depression with the intent of answering two research questions that address gaps in the literature: 1) What specific aspects of graduate research and teaching affect PhD student depression? 2) How does PhD students’ depression affect their experience in research and teaching?

Student Interviews

This study was done under an approved Arizona State University Institutional Review Board protocol (no. 00011040).

In Fall 2019, we surveyed graduate students by sending an email out to program administrators of all life sciences graduate programs in the United States that are listed in U.S. News & World Report (2019) . Of the 259 graduate programs that we contacted, 75 (29.0%) program administrators agreed to forward our survey to students enrolled in their graduate programs. Of the 840 graduate students who participated in the survey, 459 (54.6%) self-identified as having depression based on general demographic questions on the survey. Of the 459 students who identified as having depression, 327 (71.2%) agreed to be contacted for a follow-up interview. In Summer 2020, we sent a recruitment email out to the 327 students who identified as having depression, asking to interview them about their experiences with depression in a PhD program. We specifically did not require that students be diagnosed with depression in order to participate in the interview study. We did not want to bias our sample, as mental health care is disproportionately unavailable to Black and Latinx individuals, as well as to those who come from low socioeconomic backgrounds ( Howell and McFeeters, 2008 ; Kataoka et al. , 2002 ; Santiago et al. , 2013 ). Of the students who were contacted, 50 PhD students (15.3%) enrolled across 28 life sciences PhD programs completed an interview.

The interview script was based on a previous interview script that we had developed, which successfully elicited what aspects of research affect depression in undergraduates and how depression affects their research ( Cooper et al. , 2020a ). Our previous work has shown that research experiences do not exclusively worsen depression, but that aspects of research can also help students manage their depression ( Cooper et al. , 2020a ). As such, our interview questions explored what aspects of research helped students manage their depression (positively affecting depression), and what aspects worsened students’ depression (negatively affecting depression). Additionally, we hypothesized that other prominent aspects of graduate school, such as teaching, would also affect PhD student depression and revised the interview script to include questions focused on examining the relationship between depression and teaching. We asked students what aspects of graduate research and teaching made their depression worse and what aspects helped them manage their depression. Participants were invited to come up with as many aspects as possible. We also asked how students perceived their depression affected their research and teaching. With the knowledge that we would be conducting interviews during summer of 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that the pandemic had likely exacerbated graduate student depression ( Chirikov et al. , 2020 ), we directed students to not reference aspects of research and teaching that were uniquely related to the pandemic (e.g., teaching remotely or halted research) when discussing the relationship between research, teaching, and depression. We were specifically interested in aspects of teaching and research that affected student depression before the pandemic and would presumably affect student depression afterward. We conducted think-aloud interviews with four graduate students who identified as having depression to ensure that our questions would not offend anyone with depression and to establish cognitive validity of the interview script by ensuring that each student understood what each question was asking. The interview script was iteratively revised after each think-aloud interview ( Trenor et al. , 2011 ). A final copy of the interview script can be found in the Supplemental Material.

All interviews were conducted using Zoom by one of two researchers (L.E.G. or K.M.C.). The average interview time was about 45 minutes. After the interview, all participants were sent a short survey to collect their demographics and additional information about their depression (a copy of the survey can be found in the Supplemental Material). Participants were provided a small monetary gift card in exchange for their time. All interviews were deidentified and transcribed before analysis.

Interview Analysis

Three researchers (L.E.G., N.J.W., and K.M.C.) independently reviewed 12 of the same randomly selected interviews to explore each idea that a participant expressed and to identify recurring themes ( Charmaz, 2006 ). Each researcher took detailed analytic notes during the review. After, the three researchers met to discuss their notes and to identify an initial set of recurring themes that occurred throughout the interviews ( Saldaña, 2015 ). The authors created an initial codebook outlining each theme and the related description. Together, the authors then reviewed the same set of five additional interviews to validate the themes outlined in the codebook and to identify any themes that may have been missed during the initial review. The researchers used constant comparison methods to compare quotes from the interviews to each theme and to establish whether any quotes were different enough from a particular theme to warrant an additional code ( Glesne and Peshkin, 1992 ). Together, the three researchers revised the codebook until they were confident that it captured the most common themes and that no new themes were emerging. A final copy of the codebook can be found in the Supplemental Material. Two authors (L.E.G. and N.J.W.) used the final codebook to code five randomly selected interviews (10% of all interviews) and their Cohen’s κ interrater score was at an acceptable level (κ = 0.94; Landis and Koch, 1977 ). Then, one researcher (N.J.W.) coded the remaining 45 interviews. In the text, we present themes mentioned by at least 10% of interviewees and use quotes to highlight themes. Some quotes were lightly edited for clarity.

Author Positionality

Some of the authors identify as having depression and some do not. One author had completed a PhD program (K.M.C.), one author was in the process of completing a PhD program (L.E.G.), and two authors were undergraduates (N.J.W. and I.F.) at the time when the interviews and analyses took place.

Interview Participants

Fifty PhD students agreed to participate in the study. Students were primarily women (58%), white (74%), and continuing-generation college students (78%). Twelve percent of students were international students, and the average age of the participants was 28 years old. While 20% of students were unsure of their career goals, 32% of students planned to pursue a career in academia, and 24% were planning to pursue a career in industry. Students reported how severe they perceived their depression to be, on average, during the time they had spent in their PhD programs. Most students reported their depression as either moderate (50%) or severe (28%). Eighty percent of students reported being diagnosed with depression, and 74% reported receiving treatment for depression. Participants were at different stages in their PhD programs ranging from first year to sixth year or more. Three students had graduated between the time they completed the initial survey and when they participated in the interview in Summer 2020. Students self-reported their main research areas and represented a broad range, with ecology and evolutionary biology (26%), animal science (14%), molecular biology (14%), and neurobiology (10%) being the most common. Eighty-six percent of students had experience teaching undergraduates, primarily as teaching assistants (TAs), at the time of the interviews. All student demographics are summarized in Table 1 .

Participant demographics

The Effect of Research on Graduate Student Depression

Students more commonly identified ways that research negatively affected their depression than ways research positively affected their depression. Considering all factors that students listed and not just those that were most common, students on average listed two ways in which an aspect of research negatively affected their depression and one way in which an aspect of research positively affected their depression.

The most commonly reported aspect of research that worsened students’ depression was experiencing failures, obstacles, or setbacks in research. Specifically, students cited that failed experiments, failed research projects, and the rejection of manuscripts and grants was particularly difficult for their depression. Conversely, students highlighted that their depression was positively affected when they were able to make substantial progress on their research projects; for example, if they wrote part of a manuscript or if an experiment worked. Students also explained that accomplishing smaller or mundane research tasks was helpful for their depression, both because they felt as though they were checking off a box and also because it allowed them to focus on something other than the negative thoughts often associated with depression.

Students also highlighted that the unstructured nature of graduate research worsened their depression. Specifically, students described that, in graduate research, there are often no clear directions, sets of guidelines, or deadlines to help structure their day-to-day activities. Without this structure, students need to rely on their own motivation to outline goals, accomplish tasks, or seek help, which participants described can be difficult when one is experiencing a depressive episode. However, students also felt as though the unstructured nature of research benefited their depression, because it allowed for flexibility. Those who did not have frequent deadlines or strict schedules were able to not conduct research on days when they needed to recover from a depressive episode or schedule research around therapy or other activities that had a positive impact on their depression. Finally, students highlighted that their passion for their research was protective against depression. Their love for the subject of their research or thinking about how their work may have a positive impact on others could positively affect their motivation or mood.

Students described that their relationships with others in the lab also affected their depression. Specifically, if their mentors or others in their lab had unreasonable or overwhelming expectations of them, it could make them feel as though they would never be able to meet such expectations. Research also provides an environment for students to constantly compare themselves with others, both those in supervisory roles as well as peers. Notably, when students mentioned comparing themselves with others, this comparison never made them feel good about themselves, but was exclusively detrimental to their depression; they felt as though they would never be able to accomplish what others had already accomplished. Students’ relationships with their mentors also seemed to have a notable impact on their depression. Having a positive relationship with their mentors or a mentor who provided psychosocial support positively affected their depression, whereas perceiving a negative relationship with their mentors, particularly a mentor who provided consistently harsh or negative feedback, was detrimental. Students who had absent mentors or mentors who provided infrequent technical support and guidance also felt as though this situation worsened their depression, because it prevented or prolonged their success in research. Finally, students highlighted that conducting graduate research can be isolating, because you are often working on something different from those in the lab or because those outside graduate school cannot relate to the stress and struggles associated with research. However, in instances in which students were able to collaborate with others, this could be protective against depression, because it gave students a sense of comradery or validated their feelings about specific aspects of research. The most common research-related factors that students reported negatively and positively affected their depression and example student quotes of each factor are reported in Tables 2 and and3, 3 , respectively.

Research-related factors that PhD students reported negatively affected their depression

Research-related factors that PhD students reported positively affected their depression

The Effect of Teaching on Graduate Student Depression

We asked all graduate students who had teaching experience ( n = 43) how teaching affected their depression. Graduate students more commonly identified ways that teaching positively affected their depression than ways teaching negatively affected their depression. On average, considering all factors that graduate students listed and not just those that were most common, participants listed two ways in which teaching positively affected their depression and one way in which teaching negatively affected their depression.

Graduate students most commonly highlighted that teaching provided positive reinforcement from undergraduates, which helped them manage their depression. This positive reinforcement came in multiple forms ranging from formal teaching evaluations to positive verbal comments from undergraduates about how good a graduate student was at teaching to watching undergraduates accomplish academic goals or grasp complex concepts. A subset of graduate students highlighted that teaching was good for their depression, because it was something they were passionate about or that they genuinely enjoyed. As such, it was a source of happiness, as was being able to collaborate and form friendships with other TAs or instructors. Some graduate students also acknowledged that they felt confident teaching, often because they had mastered content that undergraduates had not. However, this was not always the case; some graduate students highlighted that a lack of teaching training and preparation negatively affected their self-efficacy as instructors, which in turn exacerbated their depression. This was further exacerbated by the pressure that graduate students put on themselves to perform well as instructors. The potential to have a negative impact on undergraduates and their learning experiences could worsen students’ depression by increasing the stress surrounding their performance as a teacher. Additionally, some graduate students received negative reinforcement from undergraduates, in the form of negative comments on formal teaching evaluations or disrespectful behavior from undergraduates such as groans or eye rolls, which graduate students explained negatively affected their self-efficacy, further worsening their depression.

Students also highlighted that teaching could negatively affect their depression because it interfered with the time they felt they needed to be spending on research or added to the large number of responsibilities they had as graduate students. However, some students welcomed time away from research; teaching sometimes served as a distraction from research-related stressors. Students also highlighted that teaching is structured, which positively affected their depression. That is, there are concrete tasks, such as grading, that need to be accomplished or places that the graduate student needs to be during a specific time. This structure helped motivate them to accomplish teaching goals, even if they were feeling a lack of motivation because of their depression. The most common teaching-related factors that graduate students reported negatively and positively affected their depression and example student quotes for each factor are reported in Tables 4 and and5, 5 , respectively.

Teaching-related factors that PhD students reported negatively affected their depression

a Forty-three out of the 50 students who participated in the study had experience teaching undergraduates either as a TA or as an instructor of record. We only considered the responses from the TAs with teaching experiences when calculating the percent of students who reported each factor.

Teaching-related factors that PhD students reported positively affected their depression

The Effect of Depression on Graduate Research

In the interviews, we asked graduate students how their depression affected their graduate research, if at all. They identified three primary ways in which depression could affect research, all of which were negative. The most common way depression affected research was interfering with students’ motivation, which in turn affected their productivity. Students described that their productivity was affected immediately, for example, struggling to execute daily tasks like collecting or analyzing data. However, graduate students described that their lack of motivation ultimately resulted in larger consequences, such as delays in getting papers submitted and published. In fact, some graduate students explicitly stated that they felt as though they would have been able to graduate earlier if they had not had depression. The second way in which depression affected graduate students’ research is that it interfered with their ability to focus or concentrate. Students primarily explained that the lack of focus did not delay their research but caused their research to be less enjoyable or made them frustrated because they had to expend additional mental energy to execute tasks. Depression also caused students to be less confident or overly critical of themselves. Specifically, if an experiment did not go right or they experienced rejection of a manuscript, they tended to internalize it and blame themselves. This lack of confidence often inhibited students’ abilities to make decisions about research or take risks in research. They described frequently second-guessing themselves, which made decisions and taking risks in research more difficult. The most common ways students reported that their depression affected their research and example student quotes are reported in Table 6 .

Self-reported ways that depression affected PhD students’ research or the student as a researcher

The Effect of Depression on Teaching

Graduate students described one positive way and two negative ways that depression affected their teaching. Students explained that, because they had experienced depression, they were more compassionate and empathetic toward the undergraduates in their courses. Specifically, they felt they could better understand some of the struggles that undergraduates experience and were sometimes more likely to be flexible or lenient about course requirements and deadlines if an undergraduate was struggling. However, graduate students reported that depression also negatively affected their teaching. Specifically, depression could cause graduate students to feel disconnected or disengaged from undergraduates. It could also cause graduate students to feel as though they had a lack of energy or felt down when teaching. The common self-reported ways that depression affected PhD students’ teaching and example quotes are reported in Table 7 .

Self-reported ways that depression affected PhD students’ teaching or the graduate student as an instructor

Despite the increasing concern about graduate student mental health among those in the scientific community ( Pain, 2018 ; “The Mental Health of PhD Researchers,” 2019; Puri, 2019 ), there is a lack of information about how specific aspects of science PhD programs affect students with depression. This is the first study to explicitly investigate which particular aspects of research and teaching affect depression among life sciences PhD students and how depression, in turn, affects graduate students’ experiences in research and teaching. Overall, graduate students highlighted factors related to teaching and research that both alleviated and exacerbated their symptoms of depression. Graduate students more commonly brought up ways that research negatively affected their depression, than ways that it positively affected their depression. Conversely, graduate students more commonly mentioned ways that teaching had a positive effect on their depression compared with a negative effect. The requirement and opportunity to teach differs among life sciences graduate programs ( Schussler et al. , 2015 ; Shortlidge and Eddy, 2018 ). As such, future research should investigate whether the amount of teaching one engages in during graduate school is related to levels of graduate student depression. Despite differences in how teaching and research affect student depression, this study unveiled factors that protect against or worsen depressive symptoms. Specifically, four overarching factors affecting graduate student depression emerged from the interviews: 1) Structure; 2) Positive and Negative Reinforcement; 3) Failure and Success; 4) Social Support and Isolation. We discuss here how each of these factors may positively and negatively affect graduate student depression.

One stark contrast between research and teaching is the amount of structure in each activity. That is, students expressed that research goals are often amorphous, that there are not concrete instructions for what needs to be accomplished, and that there is often no set schedule for when particular tasks need to be accomplished. Conversely, with teaching, graduate students often knew what the goals were (e.g., to help students learn), exactly what they needed to accomplish each week (e.g., what to grade, what to teach), and when and where they needed to show up to teach (e.g., a class meets at a particular time). Graduate students highlighted that a lack of structure, particularly in research, was detrimental for their depression. Their depression often made it difficult for them to feel motivated when there was not a concrete task to accomplish. Major depression can interfere with executive function and cognition, making goal setting and goal achievement particularly difficult ( Elliott, 1998 ; Watkins and Brown, 2002 ). In fact, research has documented that individuals with depression generate less specific goals and less specific explanations for approaching a goal than individuals who do not have depression ( Dickson and Moberly, 2013 ). As such, it may be particularly helpful for students with depression when an activity is structured, relieving the student from the need to articulate specific goals and steps to achieve goals. Students noted that the lack of structure or the flexibility in research was helpful for their depression in one way: It allowed them to better treat their depression. Specifically, students highlighted that they were able to take time to go to therapy or to not go into the lab or to avoid stressful tasks, which may be important for successful recovery from a depressive episode ( Judd et al. , 2000 ).

Compared with conducting research, many participants reported that the concrete tasks associated with teaching undergraduates were helpful for their depression. This is supported by literature that illustrates that concrete thinking, as opposed to abstract thinking, can reduce difficulty making decisions in individuals with depression ( Dey et al. , 2018 ), presuming that teaching often requires more concrete thinking compared with research, which can be more abstract. Additionally, cognitive-behavioral treatments for depression have demonstrated that developing concrete goals for completing tasks is helpful for individuals with depression ( Detweiler-Bedell and Whisman, 2005 ), which aligns with graduate students’ perceptions that having concrete goals for completing teaching tasks was particularly helpful for their depression.

Positive and Negative Reinforcement

Graduate students reported that the negative reinforcement experienced in research and teaching had a significant negative effect on their depression, while the positive reinforcement students experienced only in teaching had a positive effect. Notably, students did not mention how positive reinforcement affected their depression in the context of research. Based on student interviews, we predict that this is not because they were unaffected by positive reinforcement in research, but because they experienced it so infrequently. Drawing from behavioral theories of depression, the concept of response-contingent positive reinforcement (RCPR; Lewinsohn, 1974 ; Kanter et al. , 2004 ) helps explain this finding. As summarized by Kanter and colleagues (2004) , RCPR describes someone seeking a response and being positively reinforced; for example, graduate students seeking feedback on their research are told that what they have accomplished is impressive. Infrequent RCPR may lead to cognitive symptoms of depression, such as low self-esteem or guilt, resulting in somatic symptoms of depression, such as fatigue and dysphoria ( Lewinsohn, 1974 ; Martell et al. , 2001 ; Manos et al. , 2010 ). RCPR is determined by three factors. 1) How many potential events may be positively reinforcing to an individual. For example, some people may find an undergraduate scoring highly on an exam in a class they are teaching to be reinforcing and others may find that they only feel reinforced when an undergraduate explicitly compliments their teaching. 2) The availability of reinforcing events in the environment. If graduate students’ mentors have the ability to provide them with RCPR but are never able to meet with them, these reinforcing events are unavailable to them. 3) The instrumental behavior of an individual. Does the individual exhibit the behavior required to obtain RCPR? If graduate students do not accomplish their research-related tasks on time, they may not receive RCPR from their mentor. If individuals are not positively reinforced for a particular behavior, they may stop exhibiting it, further exacerbating the depressive cycle ( Manos et al. , 2010 ). Therefore, the lack of positive reinforcement in research may be particularly damaging to graduate students, because it may discourage them from completing tasks, leading to additional depressive symptoms. Conversely, teaching presents many opportunities for positive reinforcement. Every time graduate students teach, they have the opportunity to receive positive reinforcement from their students or to witness a student’s academic accomplishment, such as an undergraduate expressing excitement when they understand a concept. As such, it is not surprising that positive reinforcement was the primary teaching-related factor that graduate students reported helped with their depression. Despite the positive reinforcement of teaching for graduate students with depression, we are not suggesting that graduate students should take on additional teaching loads or that teaching should be viewed as the sole respite for graduate students with depression. Overwhelming students with increased responsibilities may counteract any positive impact that teaching could have on students’ depression.

Failure and Success

Failure and success affected student depression, but only in the context of research; contrary to research, students rarely mentioned concrete metrics for success and failure in teaching. While graduate students highlighted receiving positive or negative reinforcement from undergraduates, they did not relate this to being a “successful” instructor. It is unsurprising that graduate students did not mention failing or succeeding at teaching, given that experts in teaching agree that it is difficult to objectively evaluate quality teaching ( d’Apollonia and Abrami, 1997 ; Kember et al. , 2002 ; Gormally et al. , 2014 ). In fact, the lack of teacher training and knowledge about how to teach effectively negatively affected student depression, because it could cause students to feel unprepared as an instructor. Integrating teacher training into graduate programs has been championed for decades ( Torvi, 1994 ; Tanner and Allen, 2006 ; Schussler et al. , 2015 ); however, the potential for such training to bolster graduate student mental health is new and should be considered in future research. With regard to graduate students’ research, the concept of success and failure was far more concrete; students mentioned failing in terms of failed experiments, research projects, and rejected manuscripts and grant proposals. Successes included accepted manuscripts, funded grant proposals, and concrete progress on significant tasks, such as writing or conducting an experiment that yielded usable data. Failure has been shown to negatively affect depression among undergraduate researchers ( Cooper et al. , 2020a ), who are hypothesized to be inadequately prepared to experience failure in science ( Henry et al. , 2019 ). However, it is less clear how well prepared graduate students are to experience failure ( Simpson and Maltese, 2017 ). Drawing from cognitive theories of depression, depression is associated with dysfunctional cognitive schemas or dysfunctional thinking that can lead individuals with depression to have negative thoughts about the world, themselves, and the future and to interpret information more negatively than is actually the case (called negative information-processing biases; Beck, 1967 ; Beck et al. , 1979 ; Gotlib and Krasnoperova, 1998 ; Maj et al. , 2020 ). Related to failure, individuals with dysfunctional cognitive schemas may harbor beliefs such as if something fails at work (or in graduate research), they are a failure as a person or that a small failure can be as detrimental as a larger failure ( Weissman, 1979 ; Miranda and Persons, 1988 ). As such, setbacks in research may be particularly difficult for PhD students with depression. Graduate students in our study also mentioned how failing in research was often out of their control, particularly failure related to experiments and research projects. The extent to which one feels they can control their environment is important for mental health, and lower estimates of control have been hypothesized to be an important factor for depression ( Grahek et al. , 2019 ). Therefore, this feeling of being unable to control success in research may further exacerbate student depression, but this would need to be tested. Importantly, these findings do not imply that individuals with depression are unable to cope with failure; they only suggest that individuals perceive that failure in science can exacerbate their depression.

Social Support and Isolation

Graduate students reported that feelings of isolation in research could worsen their depression. Specifically, they highlighted that it can be difficult for their mental health when their friends outside graduate school cannot relate to their struggles in research and when others in their research group are not working on similar projects. One study of more than 1400 graduate students at a single university found that feeling isolated from fellow graduate students and faculty positively predicted imposter phenomenon ( Cohen and McConnell, 2019 ), defined as the worry that they were fooling others about their abilities and that their fraudulence would be exposed ( Clance and Imes, 1978 ), which is positively correlated with depression among college students ( McGregor et al. , 2008 ). Developing a positive lab environment, where undergraduates, graduate students, and postgraduates develop positive relationships, has been shown to positively affect undergraduates ( Cooper et al. , 2019 ) and may also positively affect graduate students who experience such feelings of isolation. Graduate students in this study described that both teaching and research had the potential to be a source for relationship development and social support. Students who described positive collaborative relationships in research and teaching felt this had a positive impact on their depression, which aligns with a review of studies in psychiatry concluding that being connected to a large number of people and having individuals who are able to provide emotional support by listening or giving advice is protective against depression ( Santini et al. , 2015 ), as well as a study that found that social support is protective against depression, specifically among the graduate population ( Charles et al. , 2021 ).

These four factors provide clear targets for graduate programs looking to improve the experiences of students with depression. For example, increasing structure in research could be particularly helpful for graduate students with depression. Ensuring that students have concrete plans to accomplish each week may not only positively impact depression by increasing structure, but ultimately by increasing a student’s success in research. Research mentors can also emphasize the role of failure in science, helping students realize that failure is more common than they may perceive. Increasing opportunities for positive reinforcement in teaching and research may be another avenue to improving student mental health. Providing students with appropriate teacher training is a first step to enhancing their teaching skills and potential for positive reinforcement from undergraduate students ( Schussler et al. , 2015 ). Additionally, teaching evaluations, a common form of both positive and negative reinforcement, are known to be biased and disadvantage women, People of Color, and those with non–English speaking backgrounds ( Fan et al. , 2019 ; Chávez and Mitchell, 2020 ) and arguably should not be used to assess teaching. In research, mentors can make an effort to provide positive feedback or praise in meetings in addition to critiques. Finally, to provide social support to graduate students with depression, graduate programs could consider creating specific initiatives that are related to supporting the mental health of graduate students in their departments, such as a support group for students to meet and discuss their experiences in graduate school and how those experience pertain to their mental health.

Limitations and Directions for Future Research

In this study, we chose to only interview students with the identity of interest (depression), as is common with exploratory studies of individuals with underserved, underrepresented, or marginalized identities (e.g. Carlone and Johnson, 2007 ; Cooper and Brownell, 2016 ; Barnes et al. , 2017 , 2021 ; Downing et al. , 2020 ; Gin et al. , 2021 ; Pfeifer et al. , 2021 ). However, in future studies, it would be beneficial to also examine the experiences of individuals who do not have depression. This would provide information about the extent to which specific aspects of graduate research and teaching are disproportionately beneficial or challenging for students with depression. In this study, we did not explicitly examine whether there was a relationship between students’ identities and depression because of the small number of students in particular demographic groups. However, a theme that occurred rather infrequently (but is included in the Supplemental Material) is that discrimination or prejudice in the lab or academia could affect depression, which was reported exclusively by women and People of Color. As such, disaggregating whether gender and race/ethnicity predicts unique factors that exacerbate student depression is an important next step in understanding how to create more equitable and inclusive research and teaching environments for graduate students. Moreover, our sample included a significant number of students from ecology and evolutionary biology PhD programs, which may limit the generalizability of some findings. It is important to acknowledge potential subdisciplinary differences when considering how research may affect depression. Additionally, some of the factors that affect student depression, such as lack of teaching training and confidence in teaching, may be correlated with time spent in a graduate program. Future quantitative studies would benefit from examining whether the factors that affect student depression depend on the student’s subdiscipline and time spent in the graduate program. The primary focus of this study was the relationship between depression and graduate teaching/research. Many of the factors that emerged from the interviews are also associated with burnout ( Bianchi et al. , 2014 ; Maslach et al. , 2001 ). Burnout and depression are known to be highly related and often difficult to disaggregate ( Bianchi et al. , 2014 ). It was beyond the scope and design of this study to disaggregate which factors relate exclusively to the condition of burnout. Additionally, the interviews in this study were collected at a single time point. Thus, we are unable to differentiate between students who had depression before starting graduate school and students who experienced depression after starting graduate school. Future longitudinal studies could explore the effects of students’ experiences in research and teaching on their depression over time as well as on long-term outcomes such as persistence in graduate programs, length of time for degree completion, and career trajectory. This study identified a number of factors that graduate programs can address to benefit graduate student mental health, and we hope that future studies design and test interventions designed to improve the experiences of graduate students in teaching and research.

In this interview study of 50 life sciences PhD students with depression, we examined how graduate research and teaching affect students’ depressive symptoms. We also explored how depression affected graduate students’ teaching and research. We found that graduate students more commonly highlighted ways that research negatively affected their depression and ways that teaching positively affected their depression. Four overarching factors, three of which were related to both teaching and research, were commonly associated with student depression, including the amount of structure provided in research and teaching, failure and success, positive and negative reinforcement, and social connections and isolation. Additionally, graduate students identified depression as having an exclusively negative effect on their research, often hindering motivation, concentration, and self-esteem. However, they did note that depression made them more compassionate teachers, but also could cause them to have low energy or feel disconnected when teaching. This study provides concrete factors that graduate programs can target in hopes of improving the experiences of life sciences PhD students with depression.

Important Note

There are resources available if you or someone you know is experiencing depression and want help. Colleges and universities often have crisis hotlines and counseling services designed to provide students, staff, and faculty with treatment for depression. These can often be found by searching the university website. Additionally, there are free 24/7 services such as Crisis Text Line, which allows you to text a trained live crisis counselor (text “CONNECT” to 741741; Text Depression Hotline, 2019 ), and phone hotlines such as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). If you would like to learn more about depression or depression help and resources near you, visit the Anxiety and Depression Association of American website: https://adaa.org ( Anxiety and Depression Association of America, 2019 ) and the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance: http://dbsalliance.org ( Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, 2019 ).

Acknowledgments

We are incredibly grateful to the 50 graduate students who were willing to share their personal experiences with us. We thank Sara Brownell, Tasneem Mohammed, Carly Busch, Maddie Ostwald, Lauren Neel, and Rachel Scott for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this work. L.E.G. was supported by an NSF Graduate Fellowship (DGE-1311230). Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.

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What is Post-Graduation Depression and How to Overcome it

A student wearing a cap and gown walking away from the camera

Post-Graduation Depression is not a term that could be found in the American Psychiatric Association's dictionary, but research shows how real it is and the impact it has on recent grads. Depression in young adults often occurs right after they complete university coursework, often due to pressure to get a job right away or sadness leaving their college peers and life behind, according to a medical journal Addictive Behaviors Reports .

In addition, by the time a student graduates from college, they have spent the majority of their lives as students. Dr. Matt Glowiak , clinical mental health counseling faculty at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), said that higher education students have attended school for close to 20 years and it has become a major part of their identity.

"When people face an obstacle that threatens their identity, mental health may become compromised," said Glowiak. He said questions such as, "Who am I?" "What will I do next?" "Will I be successful at seeking, attaining, and maintaining employment in my field?" and others may arise among recent graduates.

Factors That Could Lead to Post-Graduation Depression

Some of the factors that could lead to post-graduation depression, according to Dr. Lotes Nelson , clinical mental health counseling faculty at SNHU, include:

Transition involving changes in students' daily living arrangements, routines, and overall shift of mindset from student to working adults.
Ease of connecting with friends and peers on campus and difficulties to do so after graduating.
Difficulties in acclimating to life in the mainstream.

Quite often, post-graduation depression is accompanied by a quarter-life crisis - a feeling that makes “twenty-somethings” doubt their life values and purpose. According to psychologists Joan Atwood and Corine Scholtz , a quarter-life crisis is, in many instances, supplemented with an emotional crisis—"the sense of desolation, isolation, inadequacy and self-doubt, coupled with a fear of failure."

Andrea Bard, associate professor of communication at SNHU and student advisor, said she often likes to compare the terrible 2s to the terrible 20s.

"When babies turn 2-years-old, they can be really difficult because they are figuring out how to be independent from their parents. When students are in their 20s they are kind of doing the same thing only bigger," she said, "they are trying to figure out how to be independent in the whole big world."

What are the Symptoms of Depression?

Post-graduation depression symptoms, according to Nelson, can include:

Decreased motivation
Loss of interest in pleasurable things
A sense of disorganization
General sense of hopelessness

In addition, Dr. Sheryl Ziegler , a licensed professional counselor, told the Washington Post that depressed new graduates often lack the motivation to get a job, as well as feeling lonely due to a lack of connection with friends. Ziegler also said that emerging adults might cope with depression with excessive alcohol consumption and recreational drug use since the college environment could have been more accepting of alcohol than life outside of college.

How to Prevent Post-Graduation Depression

For students approaching the end of their academic journey, there are ways to prevent post-graduation depression. Nelson suggested students and their mentors plan next steps before graduation.

Since campus-based college students are accustomed to easy access to basic needs, such as shelter, food, social events and activities, Nelson said planning is crucial to make a smooth transition to a new environment.

Some key factors to take into consideration in preventing post-graduation depression, according to Nelson, include:

Plan for housing accommodations. Students should particularly consider resources wherever they land after graduation, whether returning home or to a new location.
Develop a plan to create a support/network system to use as a resource. This involves thinking through who is around. Do students have friends when they return home or to a new place of residence? What will they need to do to build their social network?
Plan ahead to manage the stressors that may come along after graduation. This may consist of engaging in daily exercise, meditation routine or creating a stress management plan .
Explore career opportunities or additional schooling. If students choose to enter the workforce right after graduation, they should begin to prepare securing employment. Perhaps, connecting with a career counselor, employment agency or a recruiter to assist with the job search process would be beneficial.

Nelson, who is a National Certified Counselor, also recommended that students consult with clinical mental health counselors to work through the emotional changes they might be experiencing and to assist them with the transitional process. These professionals have the necessary expertise and credentials needed to address students’ concerns.

Creating a daily schedule and having an action plan may help the individual in reaching their personal and professional goals. Nelson stated that as a part of establishing students' goal/s, it is crucial to ensure that they develop SMART goals .

Having a daily schedule may have beneficial impacts on many aspects of recent graduates' lives, including mental health. According to a nationally ranked academic medical center Northwestern Memorial Hospital (NMH), some benefits of a daily routine include:

Better stress levels and improved mental health as a result of extra time to relax and less anxiety over making decisions on the go.

Better sleep habits and increased mental sharpness if the bedtime routine is also included in the schedule.

Better overall health due to extra planning. The more chores and activities are included in a schedule, the more organized one can become when it comes to developing healthy habits, such as eating breakfast on time or exercising.

Where Should Students Seek Help?

National Alliance on Mental Health reports that 75% of mental health conditions develop by age 24. This age group fits into both categories of last college years and the post-college transition. Many schools today offer counseling services and academic advising available to students.

This means that students who feel depressed might look for help right on campus. Further, counseling professionals might recommend additional services to students to better fit their needs.

Glowiak also recommended reaching out directly to mentors.

“For me, it always helped to speak directly with my professors I regarded as mentors,” he said. “Each of these individuals faced similar situations prior to and upon graduation, and their experience may serve as guidance.”

These mentors might know students on a personal level, including their strengths and weaknesses and have knowledge of how to guide these individuals into the “real” world.

If a student does not feel comfortable seeking help within their academic institution, there are other services available, according to Nelson. Some national resources that are also available:

SAMHSA’s National Helpline is a free, confidential, 24/7, 365-day-a-year treatment referral and information service (in English and Spanish) for individuals and families facing mental and/or substance use disorders.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a national network of local crisis centers that provides free and confidential emotional support to people in suicidal crisis or emotional distress 24/7.
Anxiety and Depression Association of America provides information on prevention, treatment and symptoms of anxiety, depression and related conditions.

It is crucial for students to remember and be reminded by mentors and professors that their depression does not define them in any way and it is possible to overcome it.

"It certainly helps to speak to someone. This helps students recognize that they are not alone in their feelings," said Glowiak.

He said recognizing that these feelings are relatively common for many students approaching graduation allows one to see that such depression is not necessarily pathological but a normal part of the human experience.

Aytaj Ismayilova is a content marketing assistant and communication student at SNHU. Connect with her on LinkedIn .

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‘There’s something anticlimactic about post-doctoral life that has left me feeling directionless.’

I've just finished my PhD, and now I feel lost without academia

I was relieved when all the pressure and expectation ended, but I miss the intellectual way of thinking

I started my full-time PhD in 2014, and finally graduated this summer after having to extend it for health and financial reasons. I never thought I would succeed, but somehow I managed (even the dreaded viva examination wasn’t as scary as it sounds). For the first month or so after graduating, I basked in the relief and elation, absolved from all that pressure and expectation. But those feelings dissipated quickly.

Several months on, the wattage of doctoral graduation has dimmed. To put it simply: I feel kind of lost and empty. There’s something anticlimactic about post-doctoral life that has left me feeling directionless and with a sense of unarticulated potential. For the past three years I have been meeting deadlines, working non-stop and striving for something that felt bigger than I am, and now what? Just silence. This has left me feeling odd, sad and not myself.

I’ve come to describe this funk as a case of post-doctoral melancholy. To me, it’s a feeling of worthlessness upon completing a PhD, an introspective sense of grief over my intellectual deterioration.

Other postgraduates have similarly spoken of post-PhD blues or a post-dissertation slump , focused on the feelings of sadness and malaise following an intense period of study. For me, these feelings are best understood as my difficulties in adjusting to losing touch with my academic community and an intellectual way of thinking. There is this painful realisation, where I’ve questioned – on numerous occasions – whether my currency in the intellectual stock market has plummeted.

Outside of my academic supervisors and university colleagues, nobody really cares about the ideas and theories that I’ve spent five years researching and writing about. Neither can friends and acquaintances relate to many of the other features of academic life that occupied my attention: extortionate conference registration fees , avoiding predatory journals , the instability of casualised academic contracts , and the unrelenting demand for research output to bolster a university’s competitiveness in national league tables .

I’m glad to no longer be worrying about these things, but I also miss who I was and I how I felt when I was working as an academic.

It’s not unusual for PhD graduates to feel this way. A few weeks ago, I saw a social media post from a former university colleague who had just got her first job working in marketing for a telecommunications firm. One person joked: “You must be loving not being shackled, ball and chain, to our stuffy university conversations.” She replied: “On the contrary, I can’t help but pine for the ‘good old days’ … the stuffier the conversations the better.” It’s a sentiment I now find myself wholeheartedly sharing.

If I loved academia so much, why am I not applying for postdocs? When trolling through job advertisements online, full-time postdoctoral research and teaching opportunities are frustratingly few and far between. When they do appear, they are lowly-paid and on short term contracts. I assume that competition in my field will be fierce, with dozens of highly qualified applicants. The dream of a postdoctoral career now feels far-fetched.

When I began my course, my supervisor wrote an email that said: “PhDs are almost indispensable if you want to be an academic but it remains extremely difficult to get into the academic job market even with one, so please don’t walk into this lightly”. With that in mind, I have resorted to working as a private tutor for school children and taking on menial jobs. I tell myself this is a brief pitstop on my long-haul journey towards my dream job.

Not all graduates will share my experience, and many will adjust to life after their PhD quite comfortably. I’m sure they will be relieved that the final slog is over. I don’t wish to make my experience sound pathological or insurmountable; many graduates deal with some unanticipated negative feelings after they have walked across the stage and shaken hands with the vice-chancellor. It’s simply a natural part of the academic journey.

Join Guardian Universities for more comment, analysis and job opportunities, direct to your inbox. Follow us on Twitter @gdnuniversities . And if you have an idea for a story, please read our guidelines and email your pitch to us at [email protected] Looking for a higher education job? Or perhaps you need to recruit university staff? Take a look at Guardian Jobs, the higher education specialist

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The Savvy Scientist

Experiences of a London PhD student and beyond

PhD Burnout: Managing Energy, Stress, Anxiety & Your Mental Health

PhDs are renowned for being stressful and when you add a global pandemic into the mix it’s no surprise that many students are struggling with their mental health. Unfortunately this can often lead to PhD fatigue which may eventually lead to burnout.

In this post we’ll explore what academic burnout is and how it comes about, then discuss some tips I picked up for managing mental health during my own PhD.

Please note that I am by no means an expert in this area. I’ve worked in seven different labs before, during and after my PhD so I have a fair idea of research stress but even so, I don’t have all the answers.

If you’re feeling burnt out or depressed and finding the pressure too much, please reach out to friends and family or give the Samaritans a call to talk things through.

Note – This post, and its follow on about maintaining PhD motivation were inspired by a reader who asked for recommendations on dealing with PhD fatigue. I love hearing from all of you, so if you have any ideas for topics which you, or others, could find useful please do let me know either in the comments section below or by getting in contact . Or just pop me a message to say hi. 🙂

This post is part of my PhD mindset series, you can check out the full series below:

PhD Burnout: Managing Energy, Stress, Anxiety & Your Mental Health (this part!)
PhD Motivation: How to Stay Driven From Cover Letter to Completion
How to Stop Procrastinating and Start Studying

What is PhD Burnout?

Whenever I’ve gone anywhere near social media relating to PhDs I see overwhelmed PhD students who are some combination of overwhelmed, de-energised or depressed.

Specifically I often see Americans talking about the importance of talking through their PhD difficulties with a therapist, which I find a little alarming. It’s great to seek help but even better to avoid the need in the first place.

Sadly, none of this is unusual. As this survey shows, depression is common for PhD students and of note: at higher levels than for working professionals.

All of these feelings can be connected to academic burnout.

The World Health Organisation classifies burnout as a syndrome with symptoms of:

– Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; – Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; – Reduced professional efficacy. Symptoms of burnout as classified by the WHO. Source .

This often leads to students falling completely out of love with the topic they decided to spend years of their life researching!

The pandemic has added extra pressures and constraints which can make it even more difficult to have a well balanced and positive PhD experience. Therefore it is more important than ever to take care of yourself, so that not only can you continue to make progress in your project but also ensure you stay healthy.

What are the Stages of Burnout?

Psychologists Herbert Freudenberger and Gail North developed a 12 stage model of burnout. The following graphic by The Present Psychologist does a great job at conveying each of these.

I don’t know about you, but I can personally identify with several of the stages and it’s scary to see how they can potentially lead down a path to complete mental and physical burnout. I also think it’s interesting that neglecting needs (stage 3) happens so early on. If you check in with yourself regularly you can hopefully halt your burnout journey at that point.

PhDs can be tough but burnout isn’t an inevitability. Here are a few suggestions for how you can look after your mental health and avoid academic burnout.

Overcoming PhD Burnout

Manage your energy levels, maintaining energy levels day to day.

Eat well and eat regularly. Try to avoid nutritionless high sugar foods which can play havoc with your energy levels. Instead aim for low GI food . Maybe I’m just getting old but I really do recommend eating some fruit and veg. My favourite book of 2021, How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reduce Disease , is well worth a read. Not a fan of veggies? Either disguise them or at least eat some fruit such as apples and bananas. Sliced apple with some peanut butter is a delicious and nutritious low GI snack. Check out my series of posts on cooking nutritious meals on a budget.
Get enough sleep. It doesn’t take PhD-level research to realise that you need to rest properly if you want to avoid becoming exhausted! How much sleep someone needs to feel well-rested varies person to person, so I won’t prescribe that you get a specific amount, but 6-9 hours is the range typically recommended. Personally, I take getting enough sleep very seriously and try to get a minimum of 8 hours.

A side note on caffeine consumption: Do PhD students need caffeine to survive?

In a word, no!

Although a culture of caffeine consumption goes hand in hand with intense work, PhD students certainly don’t need caffeine to survive. How do I know? I didn’t have any at all during my own PhD. In fact, I wrote a whole post about it .

By all means consume as much caffeine as you want, just know that it doesn’t have to be a prerequisite for successfully completing a PhD.

Maintaining energy throughout your whole PhD

Pace yourself. As I mention later in the post I strongly recommend treating your PhD like a normal full-time job. This means only working 40 hours per week, Monday to Friday. Doing so could help realign your stress, anxiety and depression levels with comparatively less-depressed professional workers . There will of course be times when this isn’t possible and you’ll need to work longer hours to make a certain deadline. But working long hours should not be the norm. It’s good to try and balance the workload as best you can across the whole of your PhD. For instance, I often encourage people to start writing papers earlier than they think as these can later become chapters in your thesis. It’s things like this that can help you avoid excess stress in your final year.
Take time off to recharge. All work and no play makes for an exhausted PhD student! Make the most of opportunities to get involved with extracurricular activities (often at a discount!). I wrote a whole post about making the most of opportunities during your PhD . PhD students should have time for a social life, again I’ve written about that . Also give yourself permission to take time-off day to day for self care, whether that’s to go for a walk in nature, meet friends or binge-watch a show on Netflix. Even within a single working day I often find I’m far more efficient when I break up my work into chunks and allow myself to take time off in-between. This is also a good way to avoid procrastination!

Reduce Stress and Anxiety

During your PhD there will inevitably be times of stress. Your experiments may not be going as planned, deadlines may be coming up fast or you may find yourself pushed too far outside of your comfort zone. But if you manage your response well you’ll hopefully be able to avoid PhD burnout. I’ll say it again: stress does not need to lead to burnout!

Everyone is unique in terms of what works for them so I’d recommend writing down a list of what you find helpful when you feel stressed, anxious or sad and then you can refer to it when you next experience that feeling.

I’ve created a mental health reminders print-out to refer to when times get tough. It’s available now in the resources library (subscribe for free to get the password!).

Below are a few general suggestions to avoid PhD burnout which work for me and you may find helpful.

Exercise. When you’re feeling down it can be tough to motivate yourself to go and exercise but I always feel much better for it afterwards. When we exercise it helps our body to adapt at dealing with stress, so getting into a good habit can work wonders for both your mental and physical health. Why not see if your uni has any unusual sports or activities you could try? I tried scuba diving and surfing while at Imperial! But remember, exercise doesn’t need to be difficult. It could just involve going for a walk around the block at lunch or taking the stairs rather than the lift.
Cook / Bake. I appreciate that for many people cooking can be anything but relaxing, so if you don’t enjoy the pressure of cooking an actual meal perhaps give baking a go. Personally I really enjoy putting a podcast on and making food. Pinterest and Youtube can be great visual places to find new recipes.
Let your mind relax. Switching off is a skill and I’ve found meditation a great way to help clear my mind. It’s amazing how noticeably different I can feel afterwards, having not previously been aware of how many thoughts were buzzing around! Yoga can also be another good way to relax and be present in the moment. My partner and I have been working our way through 30 Days of Yoga with Adriene on Youtube and I’d recommend it as a good way to ease yourself in. As well as being great for your mind, yoga also ticks the box for exercise!
Read a book. I’ve previously written about the benefits of reading fiction * and I still believe it’s one of the best ways to relax. Reading allows you to immerse yourself in a different world and it’s a great way to entertain yourself during a commute.

* Wondering how I got something published in Science ? Read my guide here .

Talk It Through

Meet with your supervisor. Don’t suffer in silence, if you’re finding yourself struggling or burned out raise this with your supervisor and they should be able to work with you to find ways to reduce the pressure. This may involve you taking some time off, delegating some of your workload, suggesting an alternative course of action or signposting you to services your university offers.

Also remember that facing PhD-related challenges can be common. I wrote a whole post about mine in case you want to cheer yourself up! We can’t control everything we encounter, but we can control our response.

A free self-care checklist is also now available in the resources library , providing ideas to stay healthy and avoid PhD burnout.

Top Tips for Avoiding PhD Burnout

On top of everything we’ve covered in the sections above, here are a few overarching tips which I think could help you to avoid PhD burnout:

Work sensible hours . You shouldn’t feel under pressure from your supervisor or anyone else to be pulling crazy hours on a regular basis. Even if you adore your project it isn’t healthy to be forfeiting other aspects of your life such as food, sleep and friends. As a starting point I suggest treating your PhD as a 9-5 job. About a year into my PhD I shared how many hours I was working .
Reduce your use of social media. If you feel like social media could be having a negative impact on your mental health, why not try having a break from it?
Do things outside of your PhD . Bonus points if this includes spending time outdoors, getting exercise or spending time with friends. Basically, make sure the PhD isn’t the only thing occupying both your mental and physical ife.
Regularly check in on how you’re feeling. If you wait until you’re truly burnt out before seeking help, it is likely to take you a long time to recover and you may even feel that dropping out is your only option. While that can be a completely valid choice I would strongly suggest to check in with yourself on a regular basis and speak to someone early on (be that your supervisor, or a friend or family member) if you find yourself struggling.

I really hope that this post has been useful for you. Nothing is more important than your mental health and PhD burnout can really disrupt that. If you’ve got any comments or suggestions which you think other PhD scholars could find useful please feel free to share them in the comments section below.

You can subscribe for more content here:

Thesis Title: Examples and Suggestions from a PhD Grad

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Your Brain on Depression (and After Treatment)

Depression might alter functional brain connectivity; treatment may change it..

Posted April 13, 2024 | Reviewed by Ray Parker

What Is Depression?
Find counselling to overcome depression
The default mode network (DMN) describes the pattern of brain activity associated with the brain at rest.
Meta-analysis has shown an association between the DMN and rumination in people with depression.
Studies suggest therapies like psychotherapy, mindfulness, and ketamine may alter the DMN.

When I first heard the term " default mode network ," I wondered if it had something to do with telephones or the internet. It doesn't. What it does have to do with is much more intriguing.

The default mode network describes the pattern of brain activity present when a person is at rest. It depicts what happens to our minds when we are not focused on anything. It's where our minds go when they wander.

For many living with depression , minds disappear into negativity, rumination over bad memories, and self-criticism.

Research into default mode networks using fMRI studies has reflected differences in the patterns of activity in depressed individuals and those without depression. A meta-analysis showed a correlation between the default mode network and rumination in individuals living with depression (Zhou et al., 2020). Specifically, areas of the brain associated with negative rumination show hyperconnectivity while at rest.

Such patterns may reinforce a vicious cycle of rumination in which a person can find themselves trapped.

If It's Neurology, Is It Destiny?

As both a clinician and a person who has experienced depression, I found this research at once validating and fearsome. If depression is related to such neurological processes, is there anything we can do about it? The answer is yes.

Research has shown that functional connectivity in the default mode network changed after a course of psychodynamic therapy in individuals living with borderline personality disorder , a condition often associated with depression (Amiri et al., 2023). Research has also shown that mindfulness training may alter default mode network connectivity (Rahig et al., 2022). A double-blind placebo -controlled trial found changes in the default mode network among individuals living with depression as measured by a resting fMRI scan after administration of ketamine , an investigational treatment for depression (Wang et al., 2022).

The presence of specific biomarkers of depression, as shown through the default mode network on fMRI—specifically hyperconnectivity between the right insula with the right middle temporal gyrus and the left intraparietal sulcus with the orbital frontal cortex, was even found to predict a positive response to psychotherapy focused on behavior activation (Crowder et al., 2015).

While the exact mechanism of change cannot fully be inferred, it could be hypothesized that treatments such as psychotherapy, mindfulness training, and ketamine may improve the flexibility of thinking, thereby releasing one from these ruminative traps.

Mindfulness training teaches us to be in the moment, something that is contrary to rumination. Psychotherapy can change how we see ourselves, the world, and others. This may change our habits of negativity. While the mechanism of change in ketamine treatment is still being explored, ketamine is what is known as an NMDA receptor antagonist. NMDA is one of the primary excitatory receptor sites in the brain, meaning that its activation may be associated with our usual patterns (Andrade, 2017). Some have hypothesized that ketamine may interrupt the default mode network directly by modulating this.

Although fMRI is not currently used in the diagnosis of depression, there do appear to be some biomarkers shown through fMRI scans of individuals living with depression at a resting state. Normalization of these patterns might correlate with recovery and response to various treatments currently utilized for depression. This is exciting research that is likely to guide advances in the diagnosis and intervention of depression.

To find a therapist, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory .

Amiri, S., Mirfazeli, F. S., Grafman, J., Mohammadsadeghi, H., Eftekhar, M., Karimzad, N., ... & Nohesara, S. (2023). Alternation in functional connectivity within default mode network after psychodynamic psychotherapy in borderline personality disorder. Annals of General Psychiatry , 22 (1), 1-12.

Andrade, C. (2017). Ketamine for depression, 1: clinical summary of issues related to efficacy, adverse effects, and mechanism of action. The Journal of clinical psychiatry , 78 (4), 10108.

Crowther, A., Smoski, M. J., Minkel, J., Moore, T., Gibbs, D., Petty, C., ... & Dichter, G. S. (2015). Resting-state connectivity predictors of response to psychotherapy in major depressive disorder. Neuropsychopharmacology , 40 (7), 1659-1673.

Rahrig, H., Vago, D. R., Passarelli, M. A., Auten, A., Lynn, N. A., & Brown, K. W. (2022). Meta-analytic evidence that mindfulness training alters resting state default mode network connectivity. Scientific Reports , 12 (1), 12260.

Wang, M., Chen, X., Hu, Y., Zhou, Y., Wang, C., Zheng, W., & Zhang, B. (2022). Functional connectivity between the habenula and default mode network and its association with the antidepressant effect of ketamine. Depression and Anxiety , 39 (5), 352-362.

Zhou, H. X., Chen, X., Shen, Y. Q., Li, L., Chen, N. X., Zhu, Z. C., & Yan, C. G. (2020). Rumination and the default mode network: Meta-analysis of brain imaging studies and implications for depression. Neuroimage , 206 , 116287.

Jennifer Gerlach, LCSW, is a psychotherapist based in Southern Illinois who specializes in psychosis, mood disorders, and young adult mental health.

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14 December 2021

Depression and anxiety ‘the norm’ for UK PhD students

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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.

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The Depression you may never have heard of

ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) --- A continuous feeling of sadness could be just a dark mood, or it could be Persistent Depressive Disorder that lasts for a long period of time. Ivanhoe explains the symptoms and treatment options.

Persistent Depressive Disorder, or PDD, is not as severe as depression, but adults can struggle with the symptoms of it for years. According to the Cleveland Clinic, three percent of Americans experience it at some point in their lives.

Jyoti Mishra Ramanathan, PhD, Neuroscientist at UCSD says, “People don’t realize sometimes that they may have it because it’s so subjective.”

Symptoms of PDD include a sad mood, fatigue, lack of concentration, low self-esteem, trouble sleeping, and lack of appetite or overeating.

Mishra, PhD says, “We’re looking at your changes in mood from day-to-day. So you don’t just tell me how you’re feeling at this very moment.”

Scientists say the first step in treatment is often a prescription for anti-depressant medications.

“About 30 to 50 percent of people respond to the standard of care, antidepressants that are available. Other than antidepressants, there’s also psychotherapy that’s available.” Explains Mishra, PhD.

Health experts say making some lifestyle changes can also help. This includes eating a well-balanced diet, exercising several times a week, and limiting alcohol use. There are also activities that can help people cope with the effects of PDD. Experts suggest going to a movie or a ballgame, spending time with friends, enjoying the outdoors, or taking a yoga class.

The Cleveland Clinic says PDD is more common in women and it can affect people at any age, including children and teens.

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Opinion Columnists | (Opinion) Sandi Squicquero: Recognizing the…

Opinion Columnists

Opinion columnists | (opinion) sandi squicquero: recognizing the signs of teen depression.

Most recently, I have been asked to write more about depression, and adolescent depression tops the list.

Why? Maybe because our teens are now in their last quarter of school, and this is a big adjustment for them.

After school is over, other pressures take over in other ways. Responsibility changes with the care of other siblings, first-time jobs or other parent honey-dos. Our teens are feeling pressure, and parents are feeling worried for them.

Will we ever forget The Columbine High School Massacre that occurred on Tuesday, April 20, 1999, in Jefferson County near Littleton? Most of us can remember where we were. I was in Texas, and when I heard it on TV, I immediately called my brother who lives in Littleton, because I was concerned regarding his daughter, my niece.

I couldn’t get through because the telephone lines were jammed just like in any other national emergency. This wasn’t Washington or New York; this was Colorado.

We still hear of similar incidents involving teen shootings at schools despite new anti-bully policies and “zero tolerance” approaches to weapons and threatening behavior by students towards others.

What is happening to our teens? Are we winning the war on teen violence and depression? I think that depends on who you ask. The U.S. Secret Service in its study of all U.S. school shootings found that schools were paying more attention to physical security instead of the pre-attack behavior of students.

We know that depression is a precursor to suicide. Adolescent depression is increasing. One in five teens suffers from clinical depression. According to the Surgeon General, a suicide occurs every two hours in our country.

It is not unusual for young people to feel “down in the dumps” or feel sad. We as parents have all seen it. When things go wrong at home or school, teens often overreact and feel stressed out and confused. Despite good parenting, youth ministers and guidance counselors, our teens often become depressed.

Today, our teens are inundated and exposed to things that baby boomers never were. These things are good and bad: the internet, television, the threat of HIV/AIDS, conflicting messages from people they trust.

Unrealistic expectations can create a strong sense of rejection that leads to disappointment and anger. Feelings of anger and resentment combined with exaggerated guilt can lead to impulsive and self-destructive acts. Our teens are losing their sense of identity, their core values, their sense of acceptance and belonging. They are falling into the black hole of depression where sometimes there is no apparent way out, no anchor or lifeline.

What can we do? How can we help? Be involved with your teen; they need more adult guidance now than ever before.

Know the signs of teen depression and the factors that can contribute. Has anyone in your family ever suffered from depression? If you have a family history for depression, this may increase the risk of someone in your immediate family developing depression.

Know what is going on with your teen and how they are affected. A fight with a girlfriend or boyfriend affects every teen differently. When I was a trauma emergency room psychiatric social worker, our teen attempts of suicide were often the result of a teen breakup.

Other life events such as death or divorce can have disastrous effects on your teen and cause negative thinking and negative thought patterns that may lead to depression. Be cautious of broken school relationships or bullying. Stressful life events often precede suicide. The behavior of depressed teenagers may differ from depressed adults, and early diagnosis and treatment are essential.

Know and recognize the warning signs of teen depression and teen suicide, and take them seriously.

Sandi Y. Squicquero M.Ed, LPC, is a licensed professional counselor who works out of the Medical Hypnosis and Counseling Center at 1180 Main St., Suite 5B, in Windsor. She has more than 30 years experience as a counselor and is board-certified in medical hypnosis.

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Why the next US recession may be pushed back to 2025, according to JPMorgan

Fears of an economic recession may have to be pushed back to 2025, according to JPMorgan.
US factory activity expanded in March for the first time since September 2022.
JPMorgan said the rebound in manufacturing activity bodes well for continued economic resilience.

The long-awaited recession that many economists and investors have been fearing may have just been delayed to 2025, according to a recent note from JPMorgan's trading desk.

The note highlighted the unexpected strength seen in ISM manufacturing activity in March, which jumped above 50 for the first time since September 2022. A reading above 50 represents an expansion in manufacturing activity, while a reading below 50 represents a contraction.

The strong manufacturing data ended a 16-month decline in US factory activity, as solid demand for goods led to a sharp rebound in production during the month.

JPMorgan's Ellen Wang and Andrew Tyler of the Market Intelligence team said the reading "contributes additional evidence on the global recovery in manufacturing."

The data comes as global PMIs are also reflecting higher, suggesting that the strength is not limited to US factories.

Watch: How tech layoffs could affect the economy

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Post PhD Depression
7 Reasons Why Your PhD Is Causing Stress And Depression
Mental Health & PhD
7 Ways PhD Students Deal With Stress And Anxiety
PhD Student Depression & Anxiety: Dealing With Mental Health Issues During Your PhD -PhD Life Stress
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PhD leads to unemployment and how to get employed after PhD?
Jon G. Allen, PhD, on the Catch-22s of Depression

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How to deal with post-graduation depression
Some symptoms that typically apply to every type of depression include: feelings of despair, hopelessness, or pessimism. a severe lack of motivation or loss of interest or pleasure in hobbies or ...
Post-Graduation Depression: Signs, Causes, and How to Cope
Post-graduation depression occurs for some people when they graduate from college or university. Causes include financial stress, changes to your routine, and the disruption of your social circle ...
This lab asked depressed Ph.D. students what's hardest—and ...
When a 2018 study revealed that Ph.D. students suffer from depression at rates far higher than the general population, it sparked a landslide of concern about graduate student mental health, with some calling it a mental health crisis.The study highlighted a need to understand what aspects of graduate school affect depression, says Katelyn Cooper, an assistant professor at Arizona State ...
Loss of Identity: Surviving Post-PhD Depression by Amy Gaeta
Less discussed is what happens to our mental health after grad school—post-PhD depression. The depression is certainly compounded by the collapsing job market and unrealistic demands of higher education, but is likely not caused by them (Fogg, 2009; Bekkouche, Schmid, & Carliner, 2022; Fernandez, 2019). Rather, I believe post-PhD depression ...
Coping With Postdefense Depression
First, know who you were before the program and whom you want to be when you finish, aside from having "Doctor" added to your name. When coaching my students, I often tell them to remember their "why": the reason they started the program to begin with. That said, the "why" is irrelevant if you lose the "who" in the process.
Post-PhD depression
This post shines some light on post-PhD depression so that we can better prepare PhD candidates for life during and after completion and provide the best support that we can to graduates. The PhD journey changes people. Even if your experience was overwhelmingly positive, a PhD changes people by virtue of its length and nature. Completion can ...
Post-College Depression: What You Need to Know
Post-College Distress Is More Common Than You Think. The sadness, loneliness, and anxiety that Baker felt after her college graduation are uncomfortable but not uncommon, says Libby O'Brien, PhD ...
The mental health of PhD researchers demands urgent attention
At that time, 29% of 5,700 respondents listed their mental health as an area of concern — and just under half of those had sought help for anxiety or depression caused by their PhD study. Things ...
Managing While and Post-PhD Depression And Anxiety: PhD Student
How To Prevent From Depression During And After Ph.D? A PhD student's experience is often marked by high rates of depression, a concern echoed in studies from universities like the University of California and Arizona State University. If you are embarking on a PhD journey, make sure you are aware of the issue, and develop strategies to cope ...
Systematic review and meta-analysis of depression, anxiety, and
In all, 16 studies reported the prevalence of depression among a total of 23,469 Ph.D. students (Fig. 2; range, 10-47%).Of these, the most widely used depression scales were the PHQ-9 (9 studies ...
More than one-third of graduate students report being depressed
PhD and master's students worldwide report rates of depression and anxiety that are six times higher than those in the general public (T. M. Evans et al. Nature Biotech. 36, 282-284; 2018).The ...
'You have to suffer for your PhD': poor mental health among doctoral
More than 40% of PhD students met the criteria for moderate to severe depression or anxiety. In contrast, 32% of working professionals met these criteria for depression, and 26% for anxiety. The ...
PhDepression: Examining How Graduate Research and Teaching Affect
However, few studies have examined how graduate school specifically affects depression. In this qualitative interview study of 50 life sciences PhD students from 28 institutions, we examined how research and teaching affect depression in PhD students and how depression in turn affects students' experiences teaching and researching.
Post-PhD depression is very real!
Post-PhD depression is very real! The journey to get there is tough. The journey through is treacherous. Walking across that stage and having the hood descend over your head… priceless! What we don't talk about enough is the struggle bus that comes after graduation. During the journey there are many feelings of excitement, regret ...
How to Overcome Post-Graduation Depression
Plan ahead to manage the stressors that may come along after graduation. This may consist of engaging in daily exercise, meditation routine or creating a stress management plan. Explore career opportunities or additional schooling. If students choose to enter the workforce right after graduation, they should begin to prepare securing employment ...
I've just finished my PhD, and now I feel lost without academia
I started my full-time PhD in 2014, and finally graduated this summer after having to extend it for health and financial reasons. I never thought I would succeed, but somehow I managed (even the ...
PhD Burnout: Managing Energy, Stress, Anxiety & Your Mental Health
Sadly, none of this is unusual. As this survey shows, depression is common for PhD students and of note: at higher levels than for working professionals. All of these feelings can be connected to academic burnout. The World Health Organisation classifies burnout as a syndrome with symptoms of: - Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
How to Beat Depression: 8 Things to Do Every Day
4. Add positive moments to your day. Research suggests, the more feel-good things you do, and the more often you do them, the better your chances may be of beating depression in the long term. You ...
Ph.D. students face significant mental health challenges
Warren Wong/Creative Commons. Approximately one-third of Ph.D. students are at risk of having or developing a common psychiatric disorder like depression, a recent study reports. Although these results come from a small sample—3659 students at universities in Flanders, Belgium, 90% of whom were studying the sciences and social sciences—they ...
7 Reasons Why Your PhD Is Causing Stress And Depression
2. Feeling hopeless, guilty, and worthless. Although at some point, many PhD students and postdocs will be made to feel like they are worthless, if this becomes a regular occurrence, it is time to take note. This may be combined with a feeling of guilt and worthlessness. It is important to remember your value as a PhD.
I'm a Recent College Grad Who Lives at Home; Have Post-Grad Depression
It's been a year since I graduated from college, and I still live at home. My therapist says I have post-graduation depression. Essay by Augustina Boateng. Apr 13, 2024, 4:09 AM PDT. The author ...
Your Brain on Depression (and After Treatment)
A double-blind placebo-controlled trial found changes in the default mode network among individuals living with depression as measured by a resting fMRI scan after administration of ketamine, an ...
Depression and anxiety 'the norm' for UK PhD students
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 ...
Post PhD Depression
Post Ph.D. depression is a real thing. It comes from a range of different feelings that are heightened or expectations that have not been realized. The good ...
The Depression you may never have heard of
Jyoti Mishra Ramanathan, PhD, Neuroscientist at UCSD says, "People don't realize sometimes that they may have it because it's so subjective.". Symptoms of PDD include a sad mood, fatigue ...
(Opinion) Sandi Squicquero: Recognizing the signs of teen depression
Know and recognize the warning signs of teen depression and teen suicide, and take them seriously. Sandi Y. Squicquero M.Ed, LPC, is a licensed professional counselor who works out of the Medical Hypnosis and Counseling Center at 1180 Main St., Suite 5B, in Windsor. She has more than 30 years experience as a counselor and is board-certified in ...
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The long-awaited recession that many economists and investors have been fearing may have just been delayed to 2025, according to a recent note from JPMorgan's trading desk. The note highlighted ...
NYC mother becomes suicidal after decade of seizures
Matthew Sedacca. Published April 13, 2024, 10:52 a.m. ET. Doctors at Jamaica Hospital Medical Center in Queens discovered a New York mother who endured more than a decade of seizures was suffering ...

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Managing While and Post-PhD Depression And Anxiety: PhD Student Survival Guide

How To Manage While and Post-Phd Depression

Grinding Away, Alone

Mentors Not Helping Much

Nature Of Research Itself

Competition Within Grad School

How To Know If You Are Suffering From Depression While Studying PhD?

Changes in Emotional And Mental State

Lack Of Pleasure From Previously Enjoyable Activities

Losing Social Connections

Changes In Appetite And Weight

Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms

Suicidal Thoughts Or Attempts

How To Prevent From Depression During And After Ph.D?

Engage With Activities Outside Academia

Seek A Supportive Mentor

Stay Active Physically

Seek Positive Environment

Remember You Have The Power

Wrapping Up: PhD Does Not Need To Ruin You

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‘You have to suffer for your PhD’: poor mental health among doctoral researchers – new research

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PhDepression: Examining How Graduate Research and Teaching Affect Depression in Life Sciences PhD Students

Nicholas J. Wiesenthal

Katelyn M. Cooper

INTRODUCTION

Student Interviews

Interview Analysis

Author Positionality

Interview Participants

The Effect of Research on Graduate Student Depression

The Effect of Teaching on Graduate Student Depression

The Effect of Depression on Graduate Research

The Effect of Depression on Teaching

Positive and Negative Reinforcement

Failure and Success

Social Support and Isolation

Limitations and Directions for Future Research

Important Note

Acknowledgments

Online Students

International Students

Campus Students

What is Post-Graduation Depression and How to Overcome it

Factors That Could Lead to Post-Graduation Depression

What are the Symptoms of Depression?

How to Prevent Post-Graduation Depression

Where Should Students Seek Help?

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