Depressing Numbers for Grad Students

This has come up occasionally on the blog, but here are some sobering figures from an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education published last year (subscription required):

Studies have found that graduate school is not a particularly healthy place. At the University of California at Berkeley, 67 percent of graduate students said they had felt hopeless at least once in the last year; 54 percent felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning; and nearly 10 percent said they had considered suicide, a 2004 survey found. By comparison, an estimated 9.5 percent of American adults suffer from depressive disorders in a given year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Meanwhile, nearly a quarter of the graduate students surveyed were not aware of mental-health services on the campus. And another Berkeley study recently found that graduate students were becoming increasingly disillusioned with careers in academe and did not view large research institutions as family-friendly workplaces.

It goes on to state that of those who considered suicide, 47% didn't tell anybody and 52% did not seek professional help. That a quarter aren't aware of campus mental-health services certainly doesn't help.