'Nature' Explores Why So Many Postgrads Have Bad Mental Health (nature.com)

An anonymous reader writes: This week Nature tweeted that the rates of depression and anxiety reported by postgraduate students were six times higher than in the general population -- and received more than 1,200 retweets and received 170 replies. "This is not a one dimensional problem. Financial burden, hostile academia, red tape, tough job market, no proper career guidance. Take your pick," read one response. "Maybe being told day in, day out that the work you spend 10+ hrs a day, 6-7 days a week on isn't good enough," said another.

The science magazine takes this as more proof that "there is a problem among young scientists. Too many have mental-health difficulties, and too many say that the demands of the role are partly to blame. Neither issue gets the attention it deserves." They're now gathering stories from postgraduates about mental-health issues, and vowing to give the issue more coverage. "There is a problem with the culture in science, and it is one that loads an increasing burden on the shoulders of younger generations. The evidence suggests that they are feeling the effects. (Among the tweets, one proposed solution to improving the PhD is to 'treat it like professional training instead of indentured servitude with no hope of a career at the end?'.)"

Comments

Why indeed

[PopeRatzo]

Six-figure school debt, PTSD from having a PhD advisor who hates you, only job prospects are adjunct positions for sub-minimum wage or research assistant, both without benefits. Parents who expect you to be on top of the world now that you have a PhD. Plus, you've spent the last 4-6 years in a library studying and haven't seen the sun since you started your Masters.

Do you really have to figure out why post-docs have depression?

Re:Why indeed

[PopeRatzo]

Since the same thing was true 30 years ago,

No. I did my doctorate almost that long ago, and it was not the same. I went to a "hard" grad school, but I was still smoking weed and getting laid occasionally. Plus, I graduated without a dime of debt thanks to being a TA and I got a tenure track gig within a year of graduation. Stuff like that is super rare in academia today. The whole game has changed. I hit the tail end of the gravy train.

This would seem to indicate an oversupply of PhD's

[west]

If the work conditions are terrible, and the success rate (presumably landing a tenure-track position) is so low, it would seem to me that the only ethical course of action is to make PhD programs *much* harder to get into, and to discourage students who are considering that career path.

Unfortunately, this may be directly opposed to the interests of the university.

Should we assume that 22 year-olds are not capable of getting the information they need to make rational decisions and intervene with legislation?

Personally, I'd be fine with requiring universities to find out and disclose the percentage of post-graduates who attain a faculty position (and perhaps their salary) within 10 years of their PhD. The cost of acquiring this information would be minuscule compared to years lost by people pursuing an ultimately futile career (who we would hope would be dissuaded once they understand reality).

It might be devastating for science (lots of work by high quality, low paid post-grads lost), but the ethics are clear.

Re:This would seem to indicate an oversupply of Ph

[habig]

Personally, I'd be fine with requiring universities to find out and disclose the percentage of post-graduates who attain a faculty position (and perhaps their salary) within 10 years of their PhD

They already do this (not out of legislation, but out of honesty), and have been doing it since way back in 1989 when I was applying for grad school. And the professional societies keep detailed statistics, publishing them regularly. Although please do note that "faculty position" might not be the best metric for success: physics PhDs who go to work as data scientists out-earn their peers in academia by a lot.

Why do people do it? Because they've been at the head of their class up till that point so are confident. really really love what they're doing, and so persist in spite of the odds. Not so different than your average minor league pro athlete. Wonder what the mental health of those guys is like?

not training

[Goldsmith]

The key to understanding postgraduate work in science is that it is not training and not preparation for anything, it IS scientific work. For the vast majority of us in science, we do not continue in scientific work after academic graduate and postdoc work.

This is because of the economics of scientific work. 1) We heavily subsidize research (not a problem in itself, but the labor market and overall metrics end up set by the government). 2) We prioritize publication over any practical metric such as jobs, public interest, or economic impact. 3) We bid out this work to organizations that can maximize publications for minimal cost, allowing them to violate just about any labor law they'd like in the process.

So "scientific research" is now defined as paper publishing. The people who "do" science are graduate students and postdocs, with a small number of other people directly involved. Once you're done with that stage of your career, either you're a professor, or your primary job is not "scientific research." Though we all tend to do a little publishing in industry and government, it's generally a very minor professional metric. PhDs entering industry have to play catch up on things like processional standards, the basic concepts of profitability, and the difference between technology and product.

Of course the people caught in the middle of this are doing poorly. They're in jobs that sound like a training position, but often there's no industry for them to train for. If there is an industry to train for, you're almost always better off taking a job right out of undergrad. The professors who manage our scientific workforce have no management training. The universities employing these folks are allowed to do things like charge them for the right to keep their job, and have special visas that ensure foreign labor can't leave the job. The "investors" in science (grant managers) have no actual metrics, oversight, or practical goals other than to maximize the churn of young scientists and papers through the system. So that's what we get.

As a young scientist, you can break out of this system. The key is to understand that virtually no one at a university is going to understand what you should be doing. Find one of the few companies making progress in a scientific field you like and ask someone there what to do. Oh, and do that before you apply to grad school.

Re:"10+ hrs a day, 6-7 days a week"

[hey!]

Sure there are jobs that require that level of education. Thoracic surgeon. Biomedical engineer. School superintendent.

Many leadership positions that theoretically open to people with only undergraduate degrees are easier for people with (the right) advanced degree to get: lead data scientist, chief engineer on a megaproject like a new airliner

There are also many areas that need high educated people that are making do with less than optimal personnel. There's a critical shortage of adolescent psychologists in every single state of the US; waiting times are so long that a kid in trouble can take years to find help.

The problem is nobody is trying to match up need with supply; we encourage people to pursue their interests and assume that this will somehow end up matching the kind of people we need.

The Big (Financial) Crunch started in the 1970s

[Paul Fernhout]

Here is an explanation from 1994 by Dr. David Goodstein of Caltech, who testified to Congress on this back then, whose "The Big Crunch" essay concludes: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~d...
"Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever."

And see also "Disciplined Minds" from 2000 about some other consequences: http://disciplinedminds.tripod... "In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline." The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy. Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society."

Or Philip Greenspun from 2006: http://philip.greenspun.com/ca...
"This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead. Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias."

Or the Village Voice from 2004 about how it is even worse in the humanities than sci/tech grad school:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"Here's an exciting career opportunity you won't see in the classified ads. For the first six to 10 years, it pays less than $20,000 and demands superhuman levels of commitment in a Dickensian environment. Forget about marriage, a mortgage, or even Thanksgiving dinners, as the focus of your entire life narrows to the production, to exacting specifications, of a 300-page document le