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Reply to ‘A lack of evidence for six times more anxiety and depression in US graduate students than in the general population’

Nature Biotechnology volume 37, pages 712–713 (2019)Cite this article

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A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 09 July 2019

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Evans et al. reply — Our data demonstrated that, within the context of a cross-sectional, convenience sample of 2,279 graduate students from 26 countries and 234 institutions, 41% of respondents reported moderate-to-severe symptom levels that indicated anxiety and 39% reported moderate-to-severe symptom levels that indicated depression1. When we set out to collect data for this project in March 2016, we did not know how many survey responses we would receive, and so we were surprised to receive over 2,000 responses by the close of the survey in June 2016. The survey was shared extensively through social media and e-mail networks across the world, which speaks to the interest that the community has in this topic.

With respect to our statement that graduate students experience symptom levels that are six times higher than that of the general population, our study did not include a control population and thus we discussed how our data on graduate student anxiety and depression compared with the general population prevalence. For this, our article referenced two studies that used the same self-reported measures as ours: GAD07 for anxiety and PHQ09 for depression. Lowe et al.2 and Kocalevent et al.3 found anxiety and depression rates to be 6% in the general population. Furthermore, using GAD07, the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA) have reported anxiety rates in the general adult US population to be 2.7%4 and 3.1%5, respectively. In terms of depression symptomatology, the NIMH reports that 7.1% of adults have at least one major depressive episode in a given year6. Similarly, the ADAA reports that depression prevalence is about 6.7% in a given year5. Again, anxiety and depression rates in our graduate student population were 41% and 39%, respectively. We agree our data cannot be directly compared with these general population data, and our discussion of these data is meant to suggest that graduate student anxiety and depression rates are likely much higher than those of the general population. We agree with Duffy and colleagues that the rates of anxiety and depression (and other mental health disorders) in the graduate student population and how those rates compare with those of the general population should be studied further.

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Change history

  • 09 July 2019

    In the version of this article initially published, the Editor’s Note indicating that the article has been peer-reviewed was missing. The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Pharmacology, University of Texas Health San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

    Teresa M. Evans

  2. Department of Psychiatry, University of Texas Health San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA

    Lindsay Bira

  3. Department of Toxicology and Cancer Biology, College of Medicine, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA

    Nathan L. Vanderford

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  1. Teresa M. Evans
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Correspondence to Teresa M. Evans, Lindsay Bira or Nathan L. Vanderford.

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Evans, T.M., Bira, L. & Vanderford, N.L. Reply to ‘A lack of evidence for six times more anxiety and depression in US graduate students than in the general population’. Nat Biotechnol 37, 712–713 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-019-0181-4

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