My friend went to a meeting a couple weeks ago about students with disabilities in Oxford and came back with some statistics that surprised me. Obviously [citation needed], but he is someone whom I very, very much trust when it comes to accurately representing data to the best of his knowledge, and who doesn't like giving out numbers unless he has found a peer-reviewed article to back them up, even in day-to-day conversation. Basically, he's the model grad student. So, here goes:
According to the World Health Organization, one in four people will have a mental or neurological disorder, globally. One in four. That means that 25% of the people you know. And yet we still continue to heavily stigmatize mental illnesses and the US government wants to remove insurance coverage for mental health as part of their reformation of the Affordable Care Act.
Amongst Oxford graduate students, that statistic increases to one in two. One in two grad students! Mental health is a huge part of the day-to-day culture here. We are, to borrow the words of a professor in the English faculty, the equivalent of high-performance athletes. And athletes' bodies break down. We do that mentally -- we put our brains through a lot of stress to continue performing at the high level required to maintain our world-top status. With the academic bar getting continuously higher,* universities need better methods to help students' mental health.
*Here is an analogy:
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