Letter Addressing Mental Health Concerns

Attached here is a revised letter from the PGC regarding the February physics mental health town hall. This letter addresses how mental health issues specifically impact graduate students, urges faculty to support students facing mental health problems, and suggests action items and resources that can be taken and used by the department to support and provide professional assistance for students struggling with mental health.

Comment on survey responses initially attached to this letter: When we first sent this letter out, we also attached a compilation of 30 testimonies collected from students via a survey sent out by the PGC following the mental health town hall. With these testimonies we wanted to show the mental health issues faced by graduate students in the department and ways in which these students’ interactions with the department have caused or further exacerbated these issues. 

In conducting this survey, the PGC took action to hide names from respondents and individuals mentioned in testimonies. The survey mentioned that testimonies would be attached to this letter and asked students to signal any portions from their testimonies that should be hidden from public view. Students also had the option to ask us to summarize/paraphrase any portions of their testimonies to protect their identities, which we also honored. Upon recognizing a few students who could be easily identified from their testimonies, we reached out to them directly to confirm their consent to publish their words in a document and to work with them on ways to split and edit their testimonies to protect their identities to their level of comfort. While you cannot access such testimonies here, you can read the letter that was sent along with them to faculty and students in our department. 

27 of the 30 responses that we received mentioned problematic events that ranged from multiple housing problems faced with Columbia Residential to sexual harassment, bullying, sexism and racism perpetrated by an older student mentor and senior professors in the physics department. Several students mentioned poor teaching of classes such as graduate quantum mechanics, QFT II and particle physics as something that affected their ability to function in specific semesters. Others mentioned suicidal ideation triggered by things such as qualifying exams and lack of institutional support. Several international students mentioned how much the pandemic made their lives uncertain and stressful. Comments about anxiety and clinical depression were abundant and some students mentioned wanting to drop out of the program and to leave academia because of their graduate school experience. 10 of these 27 responses were from students who identify with a minority group in physics. Recalling that our department is overwhelmingly white and male (over 80% of students, for instance), the fact that 37% of respondents who said they had negative incidents in graduate school explicitly identified as racial or gender minorities tells us that the experience of minority groups is being severely jeopardized in our department. 

Overall, while there were 3 respondents that mentioned positive or neutral experiences at Columbia, the other 27 responses were perplexing beyond what the PGC was expecting. Mental health stability is essential for students to progress through the hard demands of a physics Ph.D. program. Following this report, we hope the department as a whole can discuss and implement actionable changes to the department response and support for mental health concerns.