Mental health in PhD students and supervisors at Lund University

Authors

  • Maria Antfolk
  • Emma Fitzgerald
  • Niels C. Overgaard
  • Elin A. Topp

Keywords:

mental health, PhD student, supervisor, general health questionnaire, GHQ-12

Abstract

Lately, the mental health and wellbeing of academic staff has been investigated. From historically having been perceived as a workplace low in mental health issues e.g. stress, anxiety and depression, the situation in academia has signicantly worsened in the last 15 years. A recent paper studying a population of Belgian PhD students reported that half of the students experienced psychological distress and one third were at risk of a common psychiatric disorder. In light of this, we have investigated the mental health of PhD students and supervisors at four different departments at Lund University using the General Health Questionnaire, one of the most commonly used assessment instruments of mental well-being. Our results show rather alarming outcomes where both PhD students and supervisors - but especially PhD students
- display signicantly higher test scores, indicating a worse state, both compared to the Belgian PhD
students as well as a general Swedish population. Over 50% of the PhD students studied and around 30% of the supervisors are at risk of a common psychiatric disorder. Furthermore, our results also indicate a connection between PhD students moving to Sweden to conduct their PhD studies and an elevated score. We suggest that our results should be followed up within a larger study population and that the common psycho-social surveys conducted yearly at the engineering faculty at Lund University should be made more specic in order to dierentiate between different staff categories.

Published

2017-10-13

Issue

Section

Articles