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This project aims to identify risk factors and stressors that determine doctoral students’ well-being.
We are a student-staff led group exploring the wellbeing of doctoral students during their professional training. Our goal is to better understand doctoral students’ mental health and build awareness, resilience and practical skills that are useful when navigating life as independent professional researchers and/or practitioners.
Given the numerous difficulties such as anxiety, depression and isolation that doctoral students struggle with during their professional training, promoting students’ wellbeing is core to this project.
The current COVID-19 global pandemic provides a unique opportunity to further understand the wellbeing and coping mechanisms of doctoral students during stressful times.
The data is collected as part of the large scale study COVID-19: Global social trust and mental health study.
The project is funded by UCL Change Makers.
- Background
One in four people experience mental health issues each year in the UK. Anxiety and depression are six times higher especially among doctoral students compared to the general public.
There is evidence for the poor mental health of doctoral students in Higher Education settings. However, the information available on how Higher Education Institutes structure support systems to address and minimise these challenges is limited.
Some of these challenges are at the macro level (institutions’ structures and policies) and others at the micro/meso level (individual difficulties, relationships with peers/friends/family).
- Aims
Besides our rapid response to understand how COVID-19 is impacting doctoral students’ wellbeing, our initial aim is to investigate what support systems are needed to support doctoral students during milestones of their academic life such as the upgrade, write-up stages or final exam viva, which might be stressful.
Reflecting upon doctoral students’ feedback, we will design and deliver workshops that encourage students to engage in a healthy relationship between work environment and wellness.
To address challenges at the institutional level, we will pilot written guidelines to support students during key stages of their professional development and doctoral training.
The above will result in cultivating a sense of community between doctoral students and staff members that embraces diversity and multiculturalism at the Department of Psychology & Human Development and then extend it across the UCL community.
Our outcomes will also help inform policy makers and other academic communities.
- Team
Principal Investigator
Co-Investigators
- Vassilis Sideropoulos
- Emily Midouhas
- Theodora Kokosi
- Jana Brinkert
- Outputs
- Sideropoulos, V., et al (2022). The effects of cumulative stressful educational events on the mental health of doctoral students during the Covid-19 pandemic. UCL Open Environment. Vol. 4.
- Doctoral Students Mental Health During COVID-19 Infographic
- Dr Maria Kambouri was invited to speak on the Warwick PPE Society Podcast series on students' mental health during the pandemic: listen to Mental Health and COVID-19: Conversation with Dr Maria Kambouri on Soundcloud (or Spotify).
- Brinkert, J., Kokosi, T., Sideropoulos, V. (2020). “COVID-19 has made a mess of things”: Experiencing the pandemic as a doctoral student. Developmental Psychology Forum 92, 15-17