Graduate Students' Mental Health in Crisis... "31% Suffer from Depression"

31% Have Depression... Average Significantly Exceeds in 20s and 30s
"Boundary Between Students and Workers... Lack of Social Awareness"

A study found that one in five graduate students has considered extreme self-harm in the past year. There are calls for measures to protect the mental health of graduate students, who are both students and research laborers.

On the 11th, the Korea Labor and Occupational Safety and Health Research Institute and the Gonggam Occupational and Environmental Medicine Center released these research findings through a report titled “Mental Health Survey of Student Research Workers.”

Minyoung Park, a clinical instructor in the Department of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, and the research team conducted an online survey from September to October last year targeting full-time graduate students enrolled in master's, doctoral, and integrated master’s-doctoral programs for this survey.

However, students majoring in arts and physical education, medical, dental, pharmaceutical sciences, law, business professional graduate schools, and education/teacher training special graduate schools were excluded from the survey, as their characteristics were considered different from those of general graduate students.

According to the survey results, 30.7% of the 365 respondents reported having been diagnosed with depression. The research team noted, “Compared to the 2021 Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey results, which showed a depression diagnosis rate of 4.8% among people in their 20s and 4.7% among those in their 30s, this is a significantly higher rate.” In fact, analysis of the survey measuring depressive symptoms found that 34.8% showed levels suspected of clinical depression.

[Image source=Yonhap News]

Respondents who had considered extreme self-harm in the past year accounted for 20.2%. This figure far exceeds the 2021 Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey averages of 5.8% for people in their 20s and 5.1% for those in their 30s. The proportions of graduate students who actually planned or attempted extreme self-harm in the past year were 7.7% and 2.2%, respectively.

In particular, experiences of violence were found to have a significant impact on thoughts of extreme self-harm. Among respondents, 19.9% and 23.5% reported experiencing verbal abuse and insulting behavior, respectively. Additionally, 40.4% reported having experienced conflicts or discord with their advisors. In in-depth interviews with 10 participants, they complained of excessive workloads, dependent relationships with professors, and mental health crises.

The research team pointed out the lack of social awareness regarding graduate students who exist on the boundary between students and workers, stating, “There has been insufficient effort to identify and improve organizational causes of the deterioration of student research workers’ mental health.”

Meanwhile, among medical graduate students excluded from this survey, the rates of experiencing verbal and physical violence were notably higher than those in other fields.

A survey conducted by Seoul National University’s Human Rights Center and the Social Development Research Institute from November 22 last year for one month targeted 1,715 graduate students across humanities, social sciences, arts, natural sciences, engineering, and medical fields at Seoul National University. The results showed that one in four medical graduate students (24.8%) reported “having been subjected to verbal abuse or insults while enrolled.” This is significantly higher than the overall average of 15.6%, with other fields reporting 18.9% in natural sciences, 14.4% in engineering, 13.7% in professional graduate schools, and 12.1% in humanities, social sciences, and arts.

The research institute analyzed that “especially in the medical field, there were many problems due to the closed atmosphere of laboratories and vertical hierarchical structures.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.