Universities urged to tackle PhD mental health crisis

early careers in HE are stressful & competitive. One problem that I have seen is that too many students are admitted who don't have appropriate qualification or ability. There is sometimes an expectation that they will somehow catch up - always a mistake. Universities and departments plus Students' Unions need to ensure that there are social networks and opportunities so that research students are encouraged to get out of the lab/away from the desk and interact with others.

I think a big problem in the UK is that student support can usually only provide 4 sessions of counselling. This is not enough for complex or severe cases, added to this you are often pushed towards NHS services (which makes sense, don't get me wrong) but then you're on a 6 month to 2 year waiting list and again get maybe 6-8 sessions. The only option is to go private but at £20-£40 a session you'll be hard pressed to access them even if you're lucky enough to get a stipend. PhD's are uniquely stressful and there needs to be a change in culture to combat this directly. Providing more mental health support (and uni's already go far beyond nearly all employers) is difficult and just papering over the cracks.

The biggest problem is one of inconsistency of professional support, and university administrators who do nothing about it. Some students get no meetings, no discussion of their topic, and no reading of their chapter drafts, or any feedback. Others get extensive support and feedback, and this may all happen inside the same department, of the same university. The only difference is who your supervisor happens to be. Such wild differences in professional support would not be tolerated in any other industry, and would almost certainly be a cause for litigation in many sectors. To my mind, the only solution is to bring some market discipline to this internally intractable problem. When a student is offered a PhD place, they should be given email access to current students of the supervisor they're allocated to, who can comment on objective criteria, such as frequency of meetings, depth and substance of discussions, whether (and how frequently) written feedback is given, etc. Only this way can prospective students make an informed decision before potentially wasting 4 years of their life, fruitlessly trying to get their supervisors to take an interest in their project. Moreover, only this way will universities feel the pinch, and stop being so inappropriately deferential towards the turkeys amongst their staff.

If anyone is interested in sharing their views aligned to support for PGRs, we are undertaking a study on: PGR's experiences of gatekeepers: Link http://goo.gl/E6br8b for PGR researchers who use gatekeepers to access participants and resources