>At first I was thinking you are doing an excessive amount of fear mongering but then I read this sentence >"I bet that at least one of your fellow students will wind up in a psychiatric hospital." >I knew two students in my Ph.D. program in math who ended up in a psychiatric ward.

Sorry, but this is also anecdotal fear-mongering. I just graduated with a PhD in CS, currently doing a postdoc, and do you know the number of people in my program who ended up in a psychiatric ward? None.

So, what does this tell us? Nothing. These are anecdotes. They give you at best a sample size of ~50 people, and a highly biased one at that.

I agree that we need to share both positive and negative stories from PhD programs (and honestly, I've seen plenty of both sorts posted to HN – the stories being told are not as uniformly rosy as the GP claims), but maybe we need to supplement these with an actual accounting of the risks and outcomes of a PhD in a given field, rather than ghost stories and fairy tales.

In general, people don't discuss mental health problems openly, so anecdotes about not seeing mental health problems should be weighted less than those that observe problems. Still if you had done a search for '"graduate student" "mental health"' instead of complaining about anecdotes you would have found a few things more substantive:

According to http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previou... :

> According to a report from the University of California (UC), nearly half of graduate students said that a mental or emotional problem had interfered with their academic work in the past year. Yet, little is known about the mental health problems that affect graduate students, including those in science.

> In one of the few studies on the subject, ... Nearly 40% of graduate students reported feeling hopeless during the previous year, 78.5% said they had felt overwhelmed, 27.2% said they had felt depressed, and 54.5% said they had felt stress over the past year ranging from “more than average” to “tremendous.”

> A 2006 report from UC paints a similar picture. About 60% of graduate students said that they felt overwhelmed, exhausted, hopeless, sad, or depressed nearly all the time. One in 10 said they had contemplated suicide in the previous year.

More details about that study are at http://scienceblogs.com/thusspakezuska/2009/02/23/grad-schoo... :

> 67 percent of graduate students said they had felt hopeless at least once in the last year; 54 percent felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning; and nearly 10 percent said they had considered suicide, a 2004 survey found. By comparison, an estimated 9.5 percent of American adults suffer from depressive disorders in a given year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

The American Psychological Association, at http://www.apa.org/gradpsych/2012/01/heal.aspx , says "87 percent of psychology graduate students reported experiencing anxiety, and 68 percent reported symptoms of depression. Even suicidal thoughts — with a prevalence of 19 percent — were relatively common."

To follow up on the suicide issue, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9357084 says graduate students were at greater risk for suicide than undergraduates.

It's true that people don't discuss mental health problems openly, and so they're less observable. However, the initial comment was about being committed to a psych ward, which is observable, so I think it's fair to offer anecdata in the opposite direction.

You are right that I should have done a search for the relevant data before criticizing the use of anecdotes. Perhaps this should be a rule for online discussions involving anecdotal evidence – the poster should also make an effort to see if there's real evidence out there.

Thanks for posting data!

Medical privacy laws in the US makes it hard to draw those connections. Can you tell who has been admitted to your nearest psych ward?

The OP wrote "I bet that at least one of your fellow students will wind up in a psychiatric hospital", not that you would know that to be the case. I doubt that the department head will tell people that student X is no longer in the program because of mental health reasons ... nor pretty much any other reason.

A friend of mine killed himself a few years ago and it took months before I could finally learn how he died, as no one would say more than "died too young." (A social worker friend of mine did clue me in that that's code word for a suicide.) Now replace that with "decided to leave the program" and how do you know what happened?

There is no need for precise data. The link is to a set of suggestions for people thinking of entering graduate school, made almost universally by people with PhDs. The OP objected to the lack of information about the dark underside of graduate school, and pointed out the likely survivorship bias.

I think you are unfairly raising the bar on the OP by calling for more rigor. If you think it's anecdotal fear-mongering then you must also object to the original responses, as their individual experiences are also anecdotal, and perhaps even anecdotal whitewashing. Their advice did not include any real evidence either.

> I think you are unfairly raising the bar on the OP by calling for more rigor. If you think it's anecdotal fear-mongering then you must also object to the original responses, as their individual experiences are also anecdotal, and perhaps even anecdotal whitewashing. Their advice did not include any real evidence either.

Oh, I do! I was trying to allude to that by including "fairy tales" in my first comment, but I should have been more clear.

Ahh, no, I misread the intent of your final paragraph. OP means "original poster"; what does GP mean?

If you agree that sharing both positive and negative stories is needed then what is the point of your post? I didn't claim to provide any evidence. I merely stated that I thought the GPs post was overly negative until it hit me that I did indeed know two people who ended up in a psychiatric ward. That is all. There aren't any claims about this being normative or in everyone's experience.

EDIT: I stated in my post that I'm ABD and that I did not complete my program so that people would know that possibly my statements nothing more than sour grapes.

most of cs PhD means a good job and good future. this does not apply to most of other major.

Most of CS is that

Not necessarily a CS PhD

After your BSc, every degree has a negative impact on your hireability. Every hiring manager has seen a flood of domestic Masters of CS and foreign BSc of low quality. I'd say a hack bootcamp has more weight now than a masters. PhDs are considered 'tainted' by academia.

That really depends on what kind of job you are pursuing after your PhD. I don't think most PhD holders in CS would go and become run of the mill software devs, but instead would hold a researchy/freeish position in the company.

One of the most difficult things to learn as a CS PhD is that you aren't an engineer, you are a scientist, so you spend your time learning to approach problems in rigorously scientific ways. In some ways it's a career switch. Doing development work after that can be a strange shift.

"approach problems in rigorously scientific ways"

CS is more math than science. Running an algorithm to find out its (asymptotic) running time would be laughed at by most CSs,they would go by calculating big-o

Having done a CS PhD it very much depends on the field. Yeah you'd be laughed at for running an algorithm to find out run time, but areas like information retrieval tends to involve humans and their reactions enough that experimental design is at the forefront, rather than big-o.

There wasn't any that I know of from my math PhD program that wound up in a psychiatric ward - I might have been the craziest one, but I ended up ok in the end, largely on my resilience.

I left after 4 years, and in hindsight, I wish I left sooner. The wasted time did give me more of a sense of urgency in anything I do though, so that I do not end up regretting what I have done professionally.