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MSUB partners with two universities to improve mental health in STEM

Billings Gazette - 9/21/2021

Sep. 21—When Jordan Webber started in on his second master's degree three weeks ago, he joked with his friends that he would be throwing himself a going away party before the semester started.

"My friends aren't going to see me until Christmas break, and by and large that's true," said Webber, who is 36. "I'm already putting in a lot of time. When I get to the point of doing a capstone it's going to get a lot worse."

The pressure to make meaningful contributions to science often pushes graduate and doctoral students in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields to their limits, and all too often results in mental health disorders.

One in three PhD students are at risk of developing common psychiatric disorders, especially depression, according to one 2017 study.

Mental health issues in higher education have been a long-standing challenge for university campuses, where demand for support typically exceeds resources.

Montana State University Billings is one of several institutions moving toward increasing support for graduate students in crisis.

Partnering with Montana Tech and University of Montana, the three schools were awarded a three-year, $500,000 grant to help institutions design, pilot, assess and implement evidence-based, sustainable and replicable strategies to improve graduate students' mental health in STEM fields, according to an MSUB press release.

Sarah Keller, professor of communications at MSUB, will take the lead from the Billings campus.

Her goal is to help build and strengthen relationships between supervising professors and students, opening up conversations about the "messy topics" of mental health, Keller said.

"As faculty feel pressure to advance in their own research they may be under such enormous stress to publish or perish that they don't allow enough time to give the support needed to guide graduate students who are also under immense pressure," Keller said.

Workshops and trainings for faculty members on cognitive behavioral therapy and well-being will hopefully strengthen adviser-student relationships and help faculty to be effective mentors, Keller said.

Grad programs often do not foster an environment for open communication about the hardships that interfere with student success.

Encouraging faculty to take time for the unpaid workshops to help build meaningful conversations about these hardships presents its own challenges, Keller said.

"Faculty work hard already, asking them to carve out time to go to unpaid workshops in the middle of the semester is going to take careful networking," Keller said.

Jana Marcette, director of honors and graduate studies at MSUB, will also be working on the grant. She said the focus on communication is what makes the program unique.

The part of the grant for professional development is an opportunity to reflect on relationships that will result in fewer negative power dynamics between supervisors and students, according to Marcette. These negative or unfulfilling interactions can lead to high stress and imposter syndrome, putting students at higher risk of mental disorders and substance abuse.

To understand the pressures of graduate school it's important to understand the structure.

Grad school

Webber explained a typical day while pursuing a master's degree in health administration.

Webber's day starts at 5:30 a.m. and by 6 he is reading a textbook. At 8 a.m. he goes to work where he'll stay until 5 p.m. Then he pauses briefly for dinner before picking up another textbook until about 8 p.m.

"If I'm lucky I'll have one to two hours to unwind before I go to bed," Webber said. "In that timeline you hear nothing about eating healthy, getting exercise (or) being social."

Webber broke down the typical time constraints for graduate students even further, saying that there are 168 hours in a week, and typically, people spend 48 of those hours sleeping, leaving 120 waking hours. About 75% of grad students work 30 hours a week and are expected to sacrifice about three hours a week for every credit hour they take.

Full-time students take at least nine credit hours a semester, meaning 27 hours will be devoted to study. That leaves about 63 hours a week to accomplish everything else such as house upkeep, cooking, exercise and maintaining relationships.

When Webber embarked on his first grad program, pursuing a master's of psychology, he was newly married. He was learning how to navigate his marriage while also working full time and committing himself to his graduate studies.

"It was like, who am I in this relationship, how do we make this work ... and on top of that, every waking moment I was at work, I was studying, or I was doing dishes," Webber said.

In his second go-round with graduate school, this time pursuing a master's of health administration, he is much better equipped in terms of health and financial stability, but even so, his wife set two caveats. The first was to complete his education with as little debt as possible. The second, Webber said was "you have to be able to do it without killing yourself."

Aside from the stressors of higher education, Webber is faced with depression and anxiety. The pressure of graduate programs as well as PhD programs often exacerbates both.

Webber said that a professor once told students that if screened during their master's program, all would show signs of borderline personality disorder.

"That's just how much stress we were under," Webber said.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, isolation, uncertainty, fear of serious illness and loss fan the flames for mental health disorders.

Major depressive disorder in graduate students during the pandemic was two times higher in 2020 than in 2019. In 2020, 32% of graduate students were diagnosed with depression, according to one study.

Students enrolled in full-time college programs are also twice as likely to abuse drugs and alcohol as those who don't attend college, according to the Addiction Center.

During his first round of graduate school, Webber remembers being very irritable and mentioned that when there is limited time to disconnect and manage the anxiety, it's easy to turn to alcohol.

"It's really easy to start relying on unhealthy coping mechanisms. I remember chain smoking. I remember going to bed after three servings of alcohol multiple times a week," Webber said. "None of these things are good, but it's an attempt to manage the stress."

Graduate students, especially in STEM fields, are expected to create new research that has never been done before.

"The expectation is that you are creating new knowledge for the world," Marcette said, making STEM studies profoundly different from professional trainings such as law or medical school.

And though researchers are embarking on new questions, working on things that have never been done before and thinking in unique ways, experiments must result in a "yes" in order to advance a career.

"Graduate work often functions under a grant and requires certain outcomes," Marcette said. "If you complete the experiment that you've poured your heart and soul into and if the answer is no...at the end of the day, you can't publish a no."

Then, the research must pivot to again start working towards a "yes."

Oftentimes advisers will layer in different experiments in order to hone the research, but then juggling multiple experiments with course work can add stress.

Marcette sees students who plan up to their limits, but when something throws them off, they enter damage control.

Jennifer Downing, 28, is starting out in her first year of her master's in public relations. At the same time, her four-year-old son is doing preschool online, meaning she is helping him focus five days a week on top of her own studies.

She gets up at 5 a.m. for two hours of uninterrupted school work. At 7 a.m. she wakes up her son, gets him breakfast and by 8 a.m. he's set up in his bedroom for online preschool.

She works for Uber Eats making her work life flexible, but the workload from school is already daunting. At times, she's had difficultly broadening her research scope, as she can't always find literature that supports her claim.

"I used to get so anxious that I'd redo a project the day before it was due," Downing said. "I hold myself to a high standard, but that makes (education) difficult at times."

Marcette said that the stress built up from having life perfectly balanced can result in little room left for resiliency. From there, students need to know how to manage crisis. Part of the money from the grant will go toward this kind of education.

The mental health condition of students in higher education has been referred to as a crisis, but finding solutions can be catch-22, as individually, students feel they need to go that extra mile in order to advance their career. And in part, that's true and necessary, Marcette said.

"It's a question where people recognize it's a problem, but it's going to take a lot of work to get to those solutions," Marcette said.

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