I think the only reason I was able to get through my PhD was because I am used to the work culture and expectations. After going into the industry in a relatively healthy and good company, I realized just how much stress I had and how bad it was in academia.<p>In a way, the grinder serves as a test of willpower and discipline and those who could persevere through it can say they have the mental fortitude to handle stress and still achieve results despite adverse circumstances. Whenever I am kinda stressed out, I recall my time in school and it gives me something similar to "I have been through worse, I can make this work".<p>On the other hand, I tell everyone who bothers to ask that no, a PhD is not worth it. Get a master and go to work. Or better, get a BS and make the company sponsor that master degree. That PhD will drain both your life and energy and once you got it, you will still need to compete against people of your level. Nothing changes except a permanent mental scar.
Honestly it really just seems like the world’s PhD programs are designed to ritually haze students and sort them into academic society based on unsustainable and barely acceptable expectations. I do not have a PhD but all my friends who do (save one) have expressed that they would rather have done something else with the time and resources it took to get theirs. Really sad. My cousin is a Psych professor at an Ivy League and he says that in his first class of the semester he tells everyone getting PhDs they will likely be taking antidepressants by the time they finish -and- that probably all of their professors are already taking them. Chilling honestly.
My father died (heart attack) while writing his master thesis, 2001. In the closer family we all attribute this to stress during the period. He was a professor at a university, maintained a farm and often traveled to São Paulo for meetings with his advisor and classes.<p>It was a common sight for me to go sleep while he was still writing, wake up and see him still writing. He had a coffee, went to the farm, come back home, lecture at the university and went back to writing again. When he could, he went to São Paulo.<p>I went somewhat the same route. I finished my master degree but I gave up doctorate when I started to feel the impact it had in my health. Not only mentally but also physically.<p>My girlfriend is now also somewhat on the same route. Fortunately she will finish her doctorate soon and will still be alive, but I see many of the symptoms of my father in her.
The study is based on a web questionnaire, answered by 589 out of 2552 Ph.D. students. The mental health of the remaining 1963 students who did not take the survey is very likely to be in worse shape than of those who did.<p>In discussion the authors say "Moreover, we want to emphasize the likely sample bias in our data. We recruited participants mainly via mailing lists and our project therefore probably has especially appealed to people who are already interested in health or aware of mental health issues."<p>I guess this bias could be significant. I can't imagine that someone who is particularly stressed, depressed and sleep-deprived will pay attention to a mailing list message that has anything to do with mental health, or aks "How's your PhD going?". Personally, if I saw such email, I would close it and forget it as fast as I possibly could.<p>Another problem is that people tend to lie to themselves about their mental health issues, telling themselves that it's not too bad. They would answer the survey more optimistically, as if this makes the issues go away. It takes a good capacity of self reflection to see the problems clearly, and the loss of such capacity often accompanies other mental health problems.<p>Additionally, it takes a particularly trusing personality to discuss your health issues in a web survey. You never know how anonymous it all really is and where the collected data may end up eventually. I'm not sure how this correlates with mental health. The paranoid types will obviously be less trusting, but I guess a certain level of care when sharing your personal health data should be normal. In any case, this is another inevitable source of bias in survey-based data.<p>These points don't invalidate the study, just suggest that it probably underestimates the real prevalence of mental health issues.
As an ex-academic, this isn't a secret. The mental health of the entire sector is in shambles, see <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01708-4" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01708-4</a><p>The Nature article and OP's article identify one culprit: poor supervision. I have a shit-list of awful supervisors that I try to steer potential students away from. Universities know that these people are awful but do nothing: in some cases I personally know, the Vice-Chancellor of the university and the toxic supervisors are best buddies.<p>Case in point: Alan Cooper, international ancient DNA expert, was fired after a long battle because he was so incredibly toxic. He just got hired by another university! <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02147-x" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02147-x</a><p>Academia has no interest in weeding out its most bad members. So I, and many others, left.
I only have a Bachelor’s but work at a large tech company where a good portion of the technical leadership have PhDs. I can’t imagine deciding to just go for a PhD right out of undergrad. In the grand scheme of things, you know nothing after a 4 year degree. I could not fathom finding a topic on which you are truly passionate and decide to dedicate the next 5-7 years of your life studying it.<p>After 6 years in industry, I have a much more solid foundation and idea of what I want to focus on for the rest of my career. But at this point, getting a PhD is not remotely a possibility for numerous reasons.<p>It’s an interesting conundrum and I see a lot of PhDs who advise against getting one. But I will always have a small pang of jealousy towards those that have one.
see also: Jeff Schmidt's book Disciplined Minds<p>> In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."<p>> The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.<p><a href="https://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/</a>
Tbh, the only reason I am crawling myself through a PhD is that I want to be a professor. Maybe in the USA this is almost unachievable, not to mention you will probably have to get an academic tenure too.<p>But where I live (northern Spain), mainly in engineering, getting a PhD almost always ensures the opportunity for an academic tenure and a professor position. We are still growing our universities' numbers and new professors are needed every year.<p>Would I be paid triple what I get now outside academia for my expertise? Yeah. But teaching is my passion so that balances out. Maybe I'll get out for a few years after I change my credentials from Mr. to Dr., just so I can afford a house, but I will come back to academia no doubt.
I’m doing a PhD in Economics right now and it’s not too stressful at this point when I’m just working on research. But my first two years when I needed to take classes and pass exams and then Covid happened they were some of the worst times of my life. I don’t know how much of that is just how our university responded to the virus though.<p>I guess I got through that grinder (only a little more than half of us did) in the end but now my experience is completely the opposite to what I’m seeing from others in this thread. Maybe it’s just that engineering is different.
For any young person contemplating a graduate program who is also interested in technology and science (ie HN reader), the only reason to do that is if you gain access to tools and materials and knowledge that are unavailable anywhere else. This means cutting-edge research labs in whatever discipline you're interested in, opportunities to travel abroad to other research centers, affiliations with National Labs or NASA's JPL, Stanford SLAC, etc. Also, they should be paying you enough to cover expenses and tuition, paying for it yourself or heaven forbid taking out more loans is not how it's supposed to work. Of course, you'll have to have put in the work and be at the top of your class to have much hope of getting such offers, plus get some good recommendations from your undergrad teachers, and have done a fair amount of technical work on an independent thesis or as a research lab assistant or some such.<p>Also, you have to vet your prospective PI's lab very carefully to make sure they're not a fraudster or a manipulative sociopath. Not as uncommon a situation as you might expect. You also might just end up working as someone's underpaid lab tech for six years and while you get the PhD at the end of it, nobody will ever even cite your research and you'll probably regret the experience (in industry, you might have been into a six-figure salary and well on your way career-wise by that point, while learning more real-work skills at the same time).<p>If you're doing it for vanity reasons or because it's expected best option is to bail on the whole thing and go get a job in industry, same if you find yourself in some crap lab run by a shyster PI. You can easily end up overworked, underpaid and with nothing much to show for it in the end.
I'm starting to think that there's an intrinsic challenge with young people being vulnerable to depression. They are thinking hard, trying to figure out what they're going to do, having all sorts of "firsts". Oppenheimer was apparently quite moody, more so when he was younger. There's an especially stark moment in American Prometheus where he unintelligbly screams, seemingly out of nowhere, and throws his luggage down a staircase, putting a woman on the stairs at mortal risk. His parents traveled to Europe to attend to him.<p>His daughter committed suicide. As did a lover of his.<p>I certainly have dark spells. When I was younger, I coped by withdrawing. Now, in my 40s, leading teams executing missions, I can't withdraw, it's very much "Hello darkness, my old friend".<p>Charles Bukowski has become a favorite author. Typing question stems into Google is far more therapeutic than browsing social media. Talking with <i>a</i> friend is more helpful than a therapist. Exercise, similarly. Talking with a friend while riding a bike is positively curative.<p>Life sucks, then you die. Stop and smell the roses. Shadenfreude isn't all bad. Etc.
The responses on this thread from january did a good job of displaying the variety of phd experiences HN users have had: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34449626">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34449626</a><p>From these and my own experiences, the results of this study are not surprising but I'm happy to see some published work on it.
I wish people would stop discussing academia as a single experience. The variability between labs and programs is enormous and depends almost entirely on the PI.<p>There are lots of toxic, stressful companies with poor leadership in competitive fields, but I wouldn't say that "industry is terrible choice" or some other sweeping generalization. People can leave a bad company and still find a great fit somewhere else, just as people can leave bad academic labs and join a better one en route to a successful career.<p>IME, most of the toxic traits ascribed to academics may be sufficient for success, but they are not necessary. There are highly successful academics who go against all the stereotypes of publish or perish, overwork, or poor management skills.
Imagine that students used to be very active in various grassroot political movements, and these days they cannot organize themselves to do some huge protest, stall every university lesson, not grade papers and finally get some huge reforms that would help them and the rest of the faculty. Unfortunate, this probably happens because people who do PhD are not actually very assertive on their own and they have very impaired cooperation skills.