As coronavirus infection and death rates explode across the nation, a survey reveals a marked increase in graduate and undergraduate students’ mental-health struggles.
Signs of depression among graduate students in the United States have apparently doubled during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a survey that drew responses from more than 15,000 graduate and 30,000 undergraduate students at 9 US research universities.
The survey, conducted by the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium — a collaboration between the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), and the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in Minneapolis — found that indications of anxiety among graduate students rose by 50% this year compared with last year.
“It’s very alarming that so many students are suffering from mental-health issues,” says Igor Chirikov, director of SERU and a senior researcher in higher education with the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley. “The pandemic has obviously had a big impact.”
The survey, which ran from 18 May to 20 July, used simple two-item questionnaires — the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-2 and Patient Health Questionnaire-2 — to screen for symptoms of anxiety disorders and major depression. Thirty-nine per cent of graduate students (a group that includes law- and medical-school students) screened positive for anxiety, and 32% screened positive for depression. When the same screening questions were asked in March to July 2019, 26% of graduate students had signs of anxiety and 15% showed depression symptoms.
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