The Psychological Needs Of Graduate Students

This report really rang true. I have a disproportionate amount of university graduate students in my practice who are anxious and depressed.

The first thing that came to mind here was a saying I first heard when I was in college.

“A university education is a prolongation of infancy.”

Even today, when pretty much everything is somehow traceable on the internet, this quotation somehow does not seem to be attributable.

When my father of blessed memory was at Harvard, he told me how the place seemed to be full of “4Fs.” These were people who did not qualify for military service, but who had flat feet like him or some other “defect.”

Now we have role models kind of like Bill Gates. Nothing like blowing Harvard to get out there and make lots of money incredibly quickly and become a major resource for mankind.

Me, I figured out back in “prep” school (college preparatory school) that this is a flagrantly anti-intellectual world.

Men had worshipped stereotypes of being handsome and heroic. The notion of achievement seemed to play some sort of role, but that role simply did not seem to be tied to university rank, or the presence of initials after a name.

As for women, it was powerfully evident that it depended on having long shiny hair, which I have never, really, been able to grow, let alone maintain.

Also, there was something to do with a flat stomach and teeny hips and a cute navel.

I have only recently become able to locate my hips or the iliac crests beneath. Since I have become able to locate my own navel with direct sight from above, I have been hopelessly objectified by waiters in buffet restaurants, who venerate me like a valued relic.

My husband lovingly reminds me that I have other value.

Most of the intellectual stuff is NOT stuff I learned in medical school which is hopelessly outmoded.

There are more women in academic graduate schools now than ever. I remember enough from my undergraduate sociology class to know that means the academic sector has been somehow “devalued,” while male humans seem to break out into some bizarre information technology that values money making computer ideas almost as much as it does male genitals.

To become an academic, a graduate student, even an incipient professor, means being in a sector where material rewards, and community respect, may be at an all-time low.

Medical school is different from being a graduate student. Even in my day it was believed to be “a glorified trade school.” Since then, doctors have been devalued so much I would drop the “glorified.”

It is no surprise to me that university graduate students tend to be anxious and depressed.