What is it about?
Graduate students often experience significant mental health struggles while working towards their degree. Unfortunately, with financial limitations and time concerns, graduate students struggle to access mental health care. This paper tested a new intervention for graduate students (Mood Lifters for Graduate Students; ML-GS) to see if it can help lower feelings of depression, stress, and anxiety among a group of graduate students.
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Why is it important?
Recently, there has been more focus on a "graduate student mental health crisis". Graduate students report more depression, anxiety and stress than other adults their age. Graduate students need more support, and they need support that they can access more easily. This intervention uses peer leaders instead of professionals, and meetings are held in a group on Zoom. These two factors help significantly drive down the cost of the intervention.
Perspectives
As a current graduate student, I know that graduate school can be an extremely difficult, demanding time. While I was running the study, I got the opportunity to see my graduate student participants come together and support each other. Regardless of what program or degree they were in, our group sessions were a time to support each other as we worked towards our goals. It's hard to find that kind of support in other spaces, and I know that having that space during my first year was extremely valuable to me as well.
Neema Prakash
University of Michigan
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Treatment for graduate students: Blunting the emotional toll of postgraduate education., Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, September 2023, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/ccp0000844.
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