No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Our Academic Discipline Is Making Us Sicker
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 August 2016
Extract
That's right, sicker. At least insofar as sick is a social construct (more on that later). I'm speaking specifically about declining mental health, and for this short essay I focus on our most emergent of theatre and performance-studies scholars: our graduate students. Few of us would disagree that there has always been a significant amount of depression and anxiety among our masters and doctoral students. Recent studies, however, find that more grad students are reporting significant mental health issues today than in any past generation. Perhaps these higher numbers are simply a matter of different and better diagnosing. More likely, those entering graduate programs today have more stressors outside academia: family responsibilities, financial concerns, and culture-related anxiety (more minorities and other historically disenfranchised groups and international students are entering graduate programs than ever before). Moreover, the increase in treatments in the past decades has enabled more students with a history of mental health issues to make it to higher education. It's not the purpose of this short piece to suss out the kinds of student in our programs more likely to be mentally and emotionally distressed. Instead, I look at what we should be doing not to make it worse for the students we have in the years ahead, actions that will benefit the field as a whole and all of us individually.
- Type
- Essays: A Call for the Future
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2016
References
Endnotes
1. Hyun, Jenny K. et al. , “Graduate Student Mental Health: Needs Assessment and Utilization of Counseling Services,” Journal of College Student Development 47.3 (2006): 247–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 247.
2. Cassandra Willyard, “Need to Heal Thyself?” GradPSYCH 10.1 (January 2012), 28, www.apa.org/gradpsych/2012/01/heal.aspx, accessed 12 April 2016.
3. Elaine Showalter, “Our Age of Anxiety,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 April 2013, http://chronicle.com/article/Our-Age-of-Anxiety/138255/, accessed 12 April 2016.
4. Nash Turley, “Mental Health Issues among Graduate Students,” Inside Higher Ed, GradHacker blog, 7 October 2013, www.insidehighered.com/blogs/gradhacker/mental-health-issues-among-graduate-students, accessed 12 April 2016.
5. The Graduate Assembly, “Summary of Findings,” in Graduate Student Happiness & Well-Being Report, University of California, Berkeley, 2014, http://ga.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/wellbeingreport_2014.pdf, accessed 12 April 2016. The 2006 study (Hyun et al., “Graduate Student Mental Health”) found that almost half the graduate students at Berkeley had experienced an emotional or stress-related problem in the past year. A 2007 study by the same investigators found that of 551 “international graduate students, 44% said they had mental health issues that ‘significantly affected their well-being or academic performance’”; Turley, quoting the abstract of Hyun, Jenny K. et al. , “Mental Health Need, Awareness, and Use of Counseling Services among International Graduate Students,” Journal of American College Health 56.2 (2007): 109–18CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. And a study of ten universities found that the highest percentage of higher-education students who contemplated suicide was among graduate students; Silverman, M. M., Meyer, P. M., and Sloane, F., “The Big Ten Student Suicide Study: A 10-Year Study of Suicides on Midwestern University Campuses,” Suicide and Life-Threatening behavior 27.3 (1997): 285–303 Google ScholarPubMed, cited in Turley.
6. Scott Jaschik, “The Other Mental Health Crisis,” Inside Higher Ed, 22 April 2015, www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/04/22/berkeley-study-finds-high-levels-depression-among-graduate-students, accessed 12 April 2016.
7. Ibid.
8. Graduate Assembly.
9. Hyun et al., “Graduate Student Mental Health,” 249.
10. That depression and anxiety (sadness) are healthy for a full and complete being is the conceit of Disney/Pixar's 2015 film Inside Out.
11. Jonathan Rottenberg, “An Evolved View of Depression,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 January 2014, http://chronicle.com/article/An-Evolved-View-of-Depression/144199/, accessed 12 April 2016. “Ironically,” writes Rottenberg, “our stratospherically high expectations about happiness have made low moods harder to bear,” resulting in increased rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide.
12. This is one of Pannill Camp's critiques of the success story epitomized by the eponymous character in the Broadway musical Hamilton: as progressive as the show might seem on the face of it, we tend to fetishize the narrative of the hardworking immigrant who pulls him- or herself up by the bootstraps in spite of entrenched systems working against peers in the same demographics. Camp points out that such expectations are informed by neoliberal and conservative perceptions. Pannill Camp, On TAP: A Theatre and Performance Studies Podcast, episode 2, 18 March 2016, www.ontappod.com/home/2016/3/18/002, accessed 18 March 2016, at 38:04.
13. Anonymous academic, “There Is a Culture of Acceptance around Mental Health Issues in Academia,” The Guardian, 1 March 2014, www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/mar/01/mental-health-issue-phd-research-university, accessed 12 April 2016.
14. “Graduate students are particularly vulnerable to pressures related to conducting research and teaching, publishing, and finding employment, in addition to stress from the often ambiguous expectations of advisors.” Not only may advisors not recognize signs of distress, but their dysfunctional relationships with students may also contribute to poor mental health. Hyun et al., “Graduate Student Mental Health,” 248.
15. Anonymous academic.
16. Cassandra Willyard writes of a graduate student reporting that even some psychology professors, whom we might imagine would know better, have sported these gatekeeping “‘biases against people with mental illness.’”
17. Anonymous academic.
18. Frances O'Gorman, “How Academe Breeds Anxiety,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 13 July 2015, http://chronicle.com/article/How-Academe-Breeds-Anxiety/231441/, accessed 22 April 2016.