US faculty members report high levels of anxiety

A pair of studies published as preprints and including data on thousands of US faculty members is revealing how anxiety manifests across academic careers . According to the studies, academics report high levels of job-related anxiety, particularly those in health disciplines . But that anxiety can be managed through access to strong familial and social support networks, the results suggest 1 , 2 . The work was born out of the authors’ shared experiences of worries related to grant cycles and to leading a research group — concerns familiar to many faculty members. Anietie Andy, a computer scientist at Howard University in Washington DC, and Marina Holz, a molecular physiologist at New York Medical College in Valhalla, met one day in 2024 to discuss a joint research project. While chatting, they commiserated over the stress of deadlines, promotions, mentoring students and the myriad tasks that faculty members face. They joked about shifting to a less anxiety-inducing career and then asked themselves whether such a career even exists. Do all jobs come with some level of stress, or is there something unique about academia, they wondered? Heeding the happiness call: why academia needs to take faculty mental health more seriously “We started looking at the literature, and there is a lot of interest in mental-health issues in students and trainees, but there is not so much attention paid to the mental-health status of faculty ,” Holz says. …