As a graduate student, you may feel like you are under tremendous pressure to succeed academically and may face a particular set of challenges that can leave you struggling to cope. Juggling between your course work, research, job and a healthy social life, all at the same time, while you are away in a different country, can leave you feeling exhausted. While some of you may thrive in this competitive environment, others may feel depressed, anxious and stressed. A general feeling of isolation can also weigh you down if you spend much of your time buried under a pile of books or alone in a lab.
If you feel you are having a hard time managing your emotional, psychological, and social well-being, it is important to realize you are not alone. There are many fellow graduate students who are experiencing and dealing with similar psychological issues. According to a study done in 2014, about 47% of PhD students and 37% of Master’s and Professional students at UC Berkeley score as depressed.
Mental health and wellness is important to realize your full potential. Many factors can contribute to mental health issues like family history, life experiences and biological factors such as genes and brain chemistry. To maintain your mental health, it is important to seek help and not sweep any signs and symptoms under the rug. There are professional counseling services available at UCI Counseling Center. Not only you can seek professional help, you can also join support groups for dealing with specific issues that you are facing. UCI’s Counseling Center provides students with crisis intervention, time-limited psychotherapy and psychiatric services, outreach, and referral services.
Joe says
November 5, 2017 at 4:07 pmI do encourage people to go to counseling center if they are having issues with their academic, research, and life issues. Earlier in the year, I had gotten very frustrated with my research progress and thus made an appointment to talk with an counselor about it. Through the conversations, I found some of my attitudes may be giving me unnecessary stress, and we are currently trying to work on that to help me work with future challenges. But even beside that, sometimes it is “helpful” to just talk your frustration out to someone, and if you know no one who are available at that time, I think talking to an counselor might be able to “help you with that” XD