Mental Hell-th
Takeaway from Trang et al. paper(s):
The obvious ones: grad students and early career are impacted the most, most people feel impostor syndrome and are stressed about jobs and/or money. Interesting that these have decreased from the 2022 to 2023 survey, which does lead to one other interesting aspect…
I stumbled across this blog post which discusses a similar study into graduate student mental health more generally, which claimed that they experienced depression at 6x greater rate than the general US population. However, that result is actually not entirely justified: the general population survey was not self-selected or conducted online, and therefore was more likely to actually be an unbiased sample, whereas the grad student one was based on online opt-in survey respondents—which of course will have a selection bias towards people experiencing anxiety/depression.
Commendations:
- Everyone: commiserating on difficult emotional or social experiences and reducing the isolation of feeling like your struggles are unique
- Ashka: I love seeing you post on social media and engaging with your hobbies outside of science/lab work! You’ve also been an important role model for me in how to stand up for yourself, especially in managing work/life balance. Your self-confidence and creativity have so been inspiring throughout our time in grad school!
- Catherine: I’ve deeply appreciated your flexibility with my struggles throughout this whole process, and your willingness to trust me to know (or figure out) what I’m doing even when it’s not your area of expertise. I also deeply appreciate your commitment to making the lab a safe and inclusive space, and it was honestly a pretty major reason I decided to come to Western in the first place
- Elisa: I’ve always admired your strong sense of morality and thoughtful stances on all of the subjects during our lab meetings - your blog posts have been some of the most enjoyable writing I’ve read on the internet, especially in the sea of either tweet-length hot takes or dry scientific tomes. I’m also impressed by the diversity of topics you seem confident engaging with, in both your hobbies and your research work—that intellectual creativity has been inspiring
- Leah: I find you have some of the wisest thoughts on a wide range of topics, and I always feel like I come away with a better understanding of myself and whatever we happen to be talking about when we get into conversation—I wish I came to the lab more often so we could do it more :(
- Reid: (Feel like we got a lot of it out last night so I’m calling this good for now lol)
- Sashank: I’m inspired your passion for both your work and space media/news outside of science, as well as your outreach work—I really get the sense that, despite the drudgery that can come with the grad school experience, the light inside you that brought you to this field in the first place has truly never faded
- Sharini: I really appreciated talking with you and Santa at the Mini-RF meeting, and it’s been great to feel like we can be open about our criticisms of things in our field with each other, while still seeing you be charitable and compassionate when actually engaging with people in our field/department. I’m also inspired by your emotional maturity despite being (I think?) the youngest person in the lab—I certainly didn’t have my head on as well as you in my early twenties!
Till next time,
-xoxo gossip grad ☾⋆⁺₊⋆
[1]I’m specifically thinking of one article I read where the main subject had made some huge breakthrough in mathematics, and in describing his day-to-day life they noted how he basically spent all day thinking and doing nothing else, while his wife—who was also a mathematician!—did all the childcare work, cooking, and laundry.