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Research demonstrates a growing mental health crisis in graduate education, which can contribute to productivity, departure, and well-being issues. To address this crisis and advocate for systemic change, this project explored faculty perceptions about graduate student mental health and how these perceptions intersect with direct action when student mental health challenges arise. We were guided by phenomenological inquiry to explore how faculty attitudes (n = 3) about mental health shape programmatic and individual decisions around supporting mental health. We thematically analyzed interviews discussing stress and mental health focused on faculty experiences. Faculty interviews demonstrated varying attitudes toward graduate student stress and mental health. Faculty desires to engage in discussions about stress or mental health were on a wide spectrum, often with work productivity guiding these discussions. Further, faculty highlighted levels of discomfort with engaging in discussions about mental health, especially with the students they work closest with. Findings indicate a need to foster faculty skill and comfort with engaging with students about their mental health while also providing clear institutional policies that support these actions to address the mental health crisis. 

The research paper examines how engineering doctoral students describe their awareness and experiences with stress and mental health during their graduate studies. Despite the known bidirectional relationship between stress and mental health, there is limited research on how engineering doctoral students rationalize the disparity between the health consequences of chronic stress and the veneration of academic endurance in the face of these challenges. Given the dangers of chronic stress to physical and mental health, it is important to understand how students perceive the purpose and impact of stress and mental health within overlapping cultures of normalized stress. We conducted semi-structured interviews to understand participants' awareness, conceptualizations, and interpretations of stress and mental health. The research team analyzed interview transcripts using content analysis with inductive coding. Overall, we found that our participants recognized behavioral changes as an early sign of chronic stress while physical changes were a sign of sustained chronic stress; these cues signaled that participants needed additional support, including social support and campus mental health services. These findings support the need for greater mental health awareness and education within engineering doctoral programs to help students identify and manage chronic stress.