![]() However, few studies have taken an inductive approach to identifying what aspects of graduate school in particular affect student mental health. Calls to identify which factors exacerbate graduate student mental health problems followed (“The Mental Health of PhD Researchers,” 2019 Woolston, 2019a). 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). This work pinpoints specific aspects of graduate school that PhD programs can target to improve mental health among life sciences graduate students. 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. 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 more commonly mentioned factors related to research that negatively affected their depression and factors related to teaching that positively affected their depression. Using inductive coding, we identified factors that either positively or negatively affected student 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. However, few studies have examined how graduate school specifically affects depression. Graduate students are more than six times as likely to experience depression compared with the general population.
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