Graduate students’ privacy boundaries in communicating about mental health with their advisors

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to understand the decision-making process that graduate students engage in when deciding whether to withhold or disclose information about mental health to their academic advisors. Guided by the principles of the phronetic iterative approach and Communication Privacy Management Theory, a thematic analysis of open-ended survey responses from 81 participants currently enrolled in graduate education revealed several privacy boundary rules used to determine whether to disclose private health information with advisors. Graduate students in this study enacted three motivational criteria (i.e., help-seeking, transparency, and relationship-building), two contextual criteria (i.e., relational closeness and relevance), and four risk–benefit ratios (i.e., anticipated advisor response, stigma, student emotional response, and advisor mental health) in creating privacy rule boundaries. These rules are discussed in terms of both theoretical and practical implications for the graduate student mental health crisis in the United States.

KEYWORDS:

• advisor–advisee relationships; graduate students; mental health; communication privacy management theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The student researcher compiled a list of national Ph.D. programs, and emailed program heads or graduate directors listed for those programs. The student focused on compiling programs in several subjects, including STEM, to balance the use of network sampling in the study’s other recruitment methods. In total, the research team emailed 111 points of contact from 11 different universities.

2 This participant chose not to disclose their intended degree or area of study.