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 suggest1,2.
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. “So, we set out to get a quick lay of the land about what anxiety looks like in academics.”
To do so, the researchers paired the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7) questionnaire — a set of seven questions used by health professionals to screen for the condition — with a questionnaire about participants’ academic backgrounds. The group first sent the questions to faculty members in the United States who are in health professions, who the authors thought might experience a unique set of mental-health challenges. More than 500 people responded. Later, the authors broadened their scope to include another 2,106 responses from academics across 62 institutions and a range of disciplines. The results were published on the preprint server medRxiv in October 2025 and in February. Both are now under review at journals.
Molecular physiologist Marina Holz (left) and computer scientist Anietie Andy were inspired by their own concerns to track academics’ anxiety levels.M. K. Holz: New York Medical College
The studies reveal that anxiety is common among academics. Roughly one-third of health professionals reported experiencing moderate-to-severe anxiety, compared with 24% in the broader academic pool. (Across the United States, generalized anxiety disorders of any severity affect slightly more than 3% of the population.) Women were more likely to experience anxiety than were men, and anxiety levels were also related to career status — assistant professors on the tenure track had higher anxiety scores compared with those at other career stages.
This research is important, says Sagar Parikh, a psychiatrist at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor who studies workplace mental health. The findings provide valuable data to support academics’ lived experiences and give institutions a starting point for developing interventions, he says.
“There has been a lot of attention to more extreme forms of mental-health [problems], but increasingly, we’re realizing that chronic anxiety is also very important, because the stressors may ease, but they never really go away,” Parikh says. “A significant achievement in any field requires sacrifice, and academia is no exception, but institutions owe it to their employees to help make those sacrifices worthwhile.”
