Why We Need to Talk More About Mental Health in Graduate School
Advice for graduate students. I am not a mental-health professional. I’m just a graduate student who finished my Ph.D., in part, because of the support I received from mental-health care professionals. But I do have some advice for graduate students with mental-health needs:
Take a deep breath. Know that you are not alone, and that these struggles do notdisqualify you from academe. It is OK to struggle. It is OK to need help. It’s OK to ask for it.
Find out what mental-health services your institution offers to graduate students — and then use those services. When you make an appointment with a campus counseling center, you can request to meet with a counselor who is familiar with graduate study and its pressures. And if your first counselor is not a good fit, ask to switch to another.
You do not owe your story to anyone. Yes, speaking out about mental-health struggles in graduate school helps normalize these problems. But if you’re uncomfortable sharing your experiences, for whatever reason, don’t feel pressured to do so on Twitter or in other public venues by anything I’ve said here or that you’ve read elsewhere. In going "public" with my own mental-health issues, I had the support of my supervisors and colleagues; not every graduate student does.
Advice for advisers and institutions. My Twitter thread showed that plenty of students have sought out mental-health care in graduate school. But it also showed that not all of them did so successfully. Some reported that they tried to seek care, but their universities didn’t offer free or low-cost counseling to graduate students. Others reported months long waiting lists, and/or care that was only available to students in crisis.
We need advisers, doctoral programs, and institutions to do better. Among other things, they should:
Provide affordable and accessible mental-health support to graduate students — regularly, not just when crisis hits.
Normalize open discussions about mental health in graduate school. Talk about it in the same way as you would discuss the importance of annual physicals. Just as athletes need personal trainers to maintain their physical condition, so, too, do academics need mental-health trainers (i.e., therapists) to keep our minds in good shape.
Don’t promote self-care as a reward. Make it part of normal graduate-student life.
Stop promoting binge drinking as a reward.
Do not say things like, "Don’t work with people who have mental-health issues." Do not use mental-health terms as an adjective to describe students when you don’t know what’s really going on with them. For more on that, read Katie Rose Guest Pryal’s Life of the Mind Interrupted: Essays on Mental Health and Disability in Higher Education.
