Back in 2021, I wrote a post about the mental health of PhD students in economics. It was based on two studies and this Substack post by Scott Cunningham. The conclusion was that economics PhD students were suffering, but perhaps no more so than PhD students in other disciplines. However, patting ourselves on the back for being no worse than any other discipline seems like a failure to me, especially when many students are genuinely in mental health crises.
The study in Cunningham's post that was focused exclusively on economics PhD students was US-based, so it is worth wondering if the results apply elsewhere. This new article by Elisa Macchi (Brown University) and co-authors, forthcoming in the American Journal of Health Economics (ungated earlier version here), provides an answer to that, being based on data from 14 top European economics departments. The study uses a similar methodology to the US study that Cunningham discussed, and two of the authors (Valentin Bolotnyy and Paul Barreira) are the same. So, these studies are about as comparable as they can get. However, this new study also looks beyond PhD students, also considering the mental health of staff in economics departments.
Specifically, Macchi et al. got survey responses from 556 students and 255 staff, from 14 universities across Europe:
...Bocconi University, Bonn Graduate School of Economics, Central European University, European University Institute, London School of Economics, Mannheim Graduate School of Economics, Paris School of Economics, Sciences Po, Stockholm School of Economics and Social Sciences, University College London, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, University of Warwick, University of Zurich, and Uppsala Universitet.
It's worth noting that most of the top-ranked European economics departments are included in that list. Notable exceptions are Toulouse School of Economics, Oxford University, and Barcelona School of Economics (all ranked in the top ten in Europe, according to RePEc). Macchi et al. explain that the "restricted our interest to Economics departments that offer a cohort-style PhD program, where graduate students are admitted in cohorts to a graduate school, rather than following a chair-style model. That might explain the exclusion of other top universities from the sample.
The surveys were quite detailed, and in terms of mental health they included commonly used measures of depression, anxiety, suicidality, loneliness, and 'imposter phenomenon'. The last of these deserves a bit more explanation, and Macchi et al. note that imposter phenomenon:
...is a condition in which one feels like a fraud and worries about being found out. Individuals experiencing imposter phenomenon do not believe that their success is due to their competence, but rather ascribe success to external factors such as luck. Those experiencing imposter phenomenon often experience fear, stress, self-doubt, and discomfort with their achievements. Imposter fears interfere with a persons ability to accept and enjoy their abilities and achievements, and have a negative impact on emotional well-being...
Many PhD students (and indeed, many academic staff) can probably relate to that. Given the range of measures employed, the two samples (students and staff), and the comparisons with the US sample (where enabled by the use of the same questions), the paper has a huge amount of detail, and so it's difficult to excerpt from. The relevance of the comparisons with the US are somewhat limited because Macchi et al. conducted their survey starting in November 2021, when many people were still feeling the mental health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, Macchi et al. note attempt to establish how much of the difference in results (for depression and anxiety) relate to the pandemic.
The headline results are that there are:
...high rates of depression and anxiety symptoms, as well as suicidal or self-harm ideation, loneliness, and imposter phenomenon among graduate students in European Economics departments. 34.7% of graduate students experience moderate to severe symptoms of depression or anxiety and 17.3% report suicidal or self-harm ideation in a two-week period. 59% of students experience frequent or intense imposter phenomenon.
And in comparison with the US sample:
The prevalence of severe and moderate depression and anxiety symptoms in our sample of European Economics graduate students is notably higher than in the 2017-2018 sample of graduate students from top Economics departments in the U.S. (Bolotnyy, Basilico, and Barreira 2022) and higher than in a meta-analysis of depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation among PhD students prior to the COVID-19 pandemic (Satinsky et al. 2021).
The Satinsky et al. paper is the other research that Cunningham referred to in his Substack post that I mentioned earlier. So, European PhD students have worse mental health that US PhD students. However, how much of that is due to the pandemic? Macchi et al. use data on the trends in mental health among Harvard University students, and note that:
...we can attribute approximately 74% of the difference in the prevalence of moderate-severe depression and 30% of the difference in the prevalence of moderate-severe anxiety between our European sample and the 2017-2018 U.S. sample to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
So, the differences in mental health were not entirely driven by the pandemic. European PhD students do indeed appear to suffer more from depression and anxiety than US PhD students. What about staff though? Macchi et al. find that:
In our faculty sample, the prevalence of severe and moderate anxiety is on average lower than graduate students as well as than comparable statistics for the post COVID-19 European population. This average, however, hides a substantial heterogeneity by seniority level. Untenured tenure-track faculty in Europe are as likely to experience depression and anxiety symptoms as graduate students in our sample, and non-tenure track faculty show even higher prevalence of depression or anxiety symptoms. In contrast, the prevalence of depression and anxiety symptoms among European tenured faculty in our sample is about 70% lower than among their graduate students and is well below the comparable rates in the post-pandemic European population.
That makes a lot of sense. Un-tenured junior academics face many of the same workload and other pressures that PhD students do. Senior and tenured academics do not. So, it shouldn't be a surprise that there is a demonstrable difference in mental health measures between junior and senior academic staff.
Macchi et al. then turn to other results from their survey, showing that:
...25.9% of students in the European sample report having experienced at least one form of sexual harassment. Excluding a form of harassment not included in the U.S. study, the sexual harassment prevalence rate in our European graduate student sample (19.5%) is comparable to the U.S. sample (19.4%).
Again, that is not good. And worryingly:
...European Economics PhD students with moderate-severe symptoms of depression or anxiety are less likely to be in treatment (19.2%) than Economics PhD students in U.S. top departments (25.2%).
That difference in access to treatment may explain some of the differences in mental health between European and US PhD students. That also leads to the first of several recommendations that Macchi et al. make (which I think should be read alongside the recommendations that Bolotnyy et al. made for the US study, which I outlined in this post). Macchi et al. recommend that: (1) the usage of mental health services by students and staff be normalised and enabled; (2) that sexual harassment be addressed; (3) that relationships between students and their advisors be improved; and (4) more structure be offered in PhD programmes to avoid students getting into ruts. I think we can and should support all of those recommendations, and they're certainly something that would help PhD students, not just in Europe and not just in economics, but more generally.
[HT: Marginal Revolution, back in 2023]
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