Manda L Keller-Ross

Strong evidence showing that getting a PhD is extremely bad for your mental health. A new paper uses Swedish medical records and matches them to the full population of PhD students for which the authors could get gender and birth year data from 2006 to 2017. After some exclusion criteria, they end up with a sample size of 20,085 individuals. The paper compares PhD students to those who have masters degrees and don't start a PhD program. Before starting a PhD program, people who stop at a masters and those who go on to seek a PhD have similar rates of psychiatric medication use and hospitalization. A few years into a PhD program, however, 40% more individuals are on psychiatric medications, before the number falls off as people leave or finish their studies. You see the same pattern with psychiatric hospitalizations. PhD students are up to 150-175% more likely to be hospitalized after starting a program! These are incredible numbers, too massive to be the result of chance or a flaw in the methodology. This is comparing the same people over time. If you're considering a PhD program, and the terrible job prospects and waste of time aren't enough, here's yet another reason to stay away.