Title: Need to heal thyself?
Headings: Need to heal thyself?
Degree In Sight
Need to heal thyself?
To Tell or Not to Tell
Steps for Self-care
Letters to the Editor

Content: Trying to handle grad school's heavy workload while still having a social life and maintaining a healthy lifestyle can be enough to stress anyone out, says John C. Norcross, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania who studies self-care and personal therapy among psychologists. These challenges can be especially daunting for students suffering from a mental illness, he notes. "Most studies of full-time doctoral students show they are routinely working 60-plus hours [a week]," he says. " And when you're working that many hours, self-care tends to plummet." Just how prevalent mental health problems are among graduate students is an open question. Only a few surveys have been conducted, and the magnitude of the problem appears to vary from school to school, depending in part on how they define mental health issues. A 2008 survey at the University of California–Irvine, for example, found 17 percent of students reported having a serious mental disorder and nearly 30 percent reported having a mental health concern that affected their well-being or academic performance. A survey from 2006 at Berkeley found that 45 percent of graduate students polled said they had a mental health issue that affected their well-being or academic performance, and almost 10 percent of respondents reported they had considered suicide in the past year. Even fewer studies have explored the prevalence of mental health problems among psychology graduate students. There have been studies of symptoms, however: