"Simmering Pressure": How Systemic Stress Impacts Graduate Student Mental Health

Graduate students suffer from issues with mental and emotional wellbeing at a high rate. While most commonly understood as an individual issue, the high prevalence of mental health problems suggests that their causes may extend beyond personal factors. A closer look at the environment that a graduate student operates in suggests systemic or organizational factors that exert notable pressures that students have to cope with. This article examines four levels of systems that create a structural environment that negatively impacts mental health and wellbeing among graduate students: (1) the academic system, (2) the institutional and departmental systems, (3) lab or cohort systems, and (4) the social-economic system. In light of this analysis, we propose a model of how systemic stress affects mental health. This model sheds light on the systems-level process improvements that can be instituted to help universities prevent mental health issues among graduate students.