'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

PhD is short for

[John Allsup]

Permanent head Damage. Been there, bashed my head against the proverbial brick wall, was never the same after.

overthinking

[e**(i pi)-1]

maybe they are just overthinking; ike worrying about overthinking and bad mental health.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

The physics field I went into had stipends for grad school, so no one I know came out with debt. And except for a hand full that stayed in academia, they all came out of school straight into six figure jobs. Yet and informal survey of a couple dozen people in similar situation shows sky high depression rates, and some are probably still hiding that they have depression. Financial burden certainly can make thigs worse, but there are problems people have even if given bucket loads of money. Can't just be pinned on the academia rat race either, as some fields have high industry hiring rates.

Re:Why indeed

[cold fjord]

You've left out some of the real charms of the current era.

Profs claim scientific objectivity reinforces 'whiteness'
Professor Claims Math, Algebra And Geometry Promote ‘White Privilege’
The Appalling Protests at Evergreen State College
All-women's college asks profs not to call students 'women'
Professor notes men are taller than women on average, SJWs storm out angrily
Americans who practice yoga 'contribute to white supremacy', claims Michigan State University professor
Conservatives, Libertarians Are ‘on the Autistic Spectrum,’ Says Duke Professor
Victimhood Culture Only Getting Worse, Professor Warns
Professor: Small Chairs in Preschools Are Sexist, ‘Problematic,’ and ‘Disempowering’
Prof creates checklist for detecting white supremacy

Believing in meritocracy, promoting a "collegial" environment, and even deciding “to stay out of all of this ‘identity politics’” are all forms of tacit white supremacy, she claims.

She Carried A Garrotte!

I blogged yesterday about a mob trying to shut down Jordan B. Peterson and others at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, and wondered aloud, “Where are there police?!” Well, turns out one of the SJWs was arrested after breaking the glass . .

Officials say officers searched her backpack and found a weapon — a metal wire with handles commonly known as a garrotte.”

I could go on, there are so many stones unturned.

Re:Why indeed

[Solandri]

The odds of success are even worse for student-athletes aiming for a career in professional sports. Yet the suicide rate among student athletes is lower than for other college students. Perhaps those jocks aren't as dumb as the nerds assumed them to be? None of my athlete friends from high school made it into professional sports, but all of them seem to have found successful and fulfilling careers in other fields.

I suspect what's going on is most people's mistaken approach to sunk costs. Post-grads have so much invested in their education in their chosen field that they find it difficult to give it all up in search of a job in other fields. Athletes knew from the beginning the odds were against them, so have always had the idea in the back of their minds that they might end up working in another field. So when their desired career path turns into misery, post-grads persist on their chosen self-destructive path, while athletes see the writing on the wall and drop back to one of their secondary career choices.

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.

Re:Why indeed

[ceoyoyo]

There's a bit of a difference. College athletes succeed or fail in undergrad, and it's probably fairly obvious who's who after the first couple of years. While they're there, they're forced to attend classes in something else.

Grad students have gone through four years of undergrad, usually four to eight years of grad school to get a PhD, then as much postdoc as they care to do before they give up. They're not 21 year old jocks who can take their accounting degree, put on a suit and get an entry level job somewhere. They're mid to late thirties, the best in the world at something, and facing the prospect of going and competing with those 21 year olds for entry level jobs.

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.

An unmentioned reason

[gtall]

I know that grad-school can be rough. As other have mentioned, advisors can be a bit ornery. Part of the problem there is the same that occurs in the rest of the economy; no one really knows how to train a good manager. So professors, who might be a bit odd to start (see reason below), wind up working their oddness on grad-students...who might just graduate and become damaged professors themselves.

A bigger reason, I believe, is that academia is more forgiving than the business world. Oddness will get canned in the business world, and I don't mean the usual crap anti-people managers inflict on their subjects. Odd in the manner of barking mad....well, maybe not entirely barking, but certainly yipping a bit like a deranged poodle. The oddness gets intensified because academia rewards individual effort, not team effort. So little oddballs get to spend a lot of time with their own brains...watering and feeding their oddness until by time of graduation, they can become true nutjobs.

Another problem for science is there are few women. That means you have a lot of little boys who don't know what do with one when she tells you in precise terms what your "issues" are. So they get no female feedback, which doesn't give a rat's ass about their ego. Their ego gets to grow unchecked and finds expression in being mean little bastards to the people they can get away with running roughshod over.

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.

Looking back, it's just like everything else in li

[ihavnoid]

I got a Ph.d. a couple of years ago. Although it wasn't a perfect match (I hated reading and writing papers soooooo much) I still consider myself to be extremely lucky. My advisor was somebody that I have great respect to, who always treated the students with respect. Adequate funding so that I could roughly break even and still start a family. Met a lot of interesting people who I still have close contact with. Long work hours, but at least I had a choice not do work long hours, it wasn't like anybody was forcing me to do so.

The thing is, you really have to be aware of what you are jumping into. If you are applying without knowing who you are working with, what kind of research topic you need to handle, it is very possible that you are going to enter one of those abusive environments. Yes, track records help. For example, how long did people take to finish their degree, how many of them ended up dropping out, etc.

When I signed up, one of the big no-no indicators were to avoid research groups that had little or zero students from that university's undergrad students. If none of the students from the better informed group bothered applying, it usually means there is something wrong.

One last thing - even after starting, if you see something is wrong, run. Personally I dont think a degree is worth being abused for years anymore.

PhD students are privileged to be mentally ill

[psb777]

The privileged are far more likely to be diagnosed mentally ill. Being a PhD student is a prime indicator of privilege. To think those stuck in menial dead end jobs are not more likely to be mentally ill is merely not to properly consider the question.

Wrong

[rsilvergun]

it's not over supply, any more than there's an over supply of musicians. Actual scientists just plain love doing science. That makes it easy for people to take advantage of them. Same as musicians get taken advantage of. And sports players. And video game programmers. And pretty much anyone who obsessively loves doing a job. There's always a few breakout successes (often times because a spouse or family member is handling the business side of things and keeping them from getting screwed) but for the most part we shit all over the rest.

This is one of the reasons minimum wage laws exist and need strict enforcement. It's also one of the reasons academia is heavily subsidized. These people will do really, really useful work if you let them. Or they'll get ground into dust if you let the suits have their way.

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

Self-selection

[argStyopa]

...Let's remember that this is a self-selected subset of people?

These are the folks who chose to remain (some would say hide) in academia while all their peers were venturing out into the world of maturity.

The avantgarde isn't in academia anymore.

[Qbertino]

That's the simple truth. In our time academia is a few useful physicists, chemists, medical researchers and a few other folks surrounded by armies and armies of regular people who have only a very faint graps of what science actually means and got themselves a PhD for the social value an academic title has.

Meanwhile the avantgarde has long since left academia. That goes for technology (preaching to the choir here), that goes for measurable amounts of applicable science and that sure as hell goes for philosophy and art. If you find an artist who's an academic you can rest assured that his/her stuff is shite and that any second-grade graffiti sprayer or street-dancer will produce better art than they.

Apart from fundamental effing hard science such as the basic nature sciences and some engineering basics academia is a farce for people doing "sociology" or "gender studies" and expecting to earn truckloads of money once they graduate.

This all goes especially for the U.S. where universities often are businesses and not official institutions. But it isn't that much better in Europe, I can tell you that much.

Lovecraft

[bigdavex]

"Frankly, I cannot conceive how any thoughtful man can really be happy. There is really nothing in the universe to live for, and unless one can dismiss thought and speculation from his mind, he is liable to be engulfed by the very immensity of creation. It is vastly better that he should amuse himself with religion, or any other convenient palliative to reality which comes to hand."

â"H.P. Lovercraft in a letter to Kleiner, Cole, and Moe, October 1916
(as quoted in the H.P. Lovecraft facebook feed)

Oversupply

[biggaijin]

One of the big drivers of uncertainty in the postgraduate job market is oversupply. The graduate schools admit too many students, so there is a glut of PhDs to fill a shrinking number of academic jobs. Schools like Stanford routinely hire three new PhDs when they anticipate one tenured opening, and let the three candidates fight it out before they make a decision in three or four years. This does not make for a collegial or healthy atmosphere. More of these students should be sent into the real world sooner by being denied admittance into graduate schools. It would be a better situation for everyone involved.

Re:Society doesnâ(TM)t like outliers

[gettin2old]

Not to mention the intellectual isolation that accompanies being smart.
It really becomes a challenge finding people you enjoy spending time with. What do you talk about? What common interests do you have? And forget about answering the "what do you do for a living" questions.
You're splitting the atom during the day and listening to talk about how you can bang sticks together nights and weekends.

Faculty Success Metric Flawed

[cosmicl]

I've seen this issue from both sides. On the academic side, if you are fortunate enough to get a faculty position, the pressure to bring in lots of grant money, and to graduate as many PhD students as possible is tremendous. The amount of grant money and the numbers of current students and graduated students are easy to enter into simple spread sheets that any administrator can read quickly. These are two main criteria for getting tenure. What happens to the students afterwards seems to be a less important metric.