Collaborative Research: Mental Health Care Pathways: Examining Help Seeking Behaviors in Engineering Graduate Students

Success of the U.S. engineering workforce depends not only on technical expertise but also on the well-being and persistence of graduate students preparing to enter high-demand fields. Untreated mental health challenges can lead to attrition, delayed degree completion, and diminished productivity, disrupting the preparation of highly skilled workers essential to innovation and economic growth. Despite this, little is known about how engineering graduate students navigate mental healthcare or make decisions about seeking professional help. Many students experience distress during graduate school, but there is limited understanding of how they recognize a problem, decide whether support is needed, identify available resources, and ultimately choose whether to access care. As a result, institutions have limited evidence to guide efforts to support graduate student well-being and persistence. By examining mental health care pathways and factors that influence help seeking in engineering graduate students, this project will identify the barriers that delay or prevent students from accessing timely support and the informal and formal resources that help them cope and persist. Findings will guide development of evidence-based strategies for institutions to reduce stigma, strengthen advising and mentoring practices, and adapt policies to better support graduate student mental health. This in turn will help the U.S. advance and retain these talented researchers in the STEM workforce. This Level II Research on STEM Learning and Learning Environments project will investigate factors at the cultural, affective, and psychological levels that affect teaching, learning, and participation in STEM education and the workforce by studying both the care pathways students follow as they navigate distress and the factors shaping their help-seeking intention and behaviors. This theory-driven, multi-institution project combines longitudinal qualitative and quantitative methods to capture how engineering graduate students recognize, interpret, and respond to mental health challenges. The project integrates two complementary frameworks, the Integrated Behavioral Model of Mental Health Help-Seeking and the Engineering Graduate Student Pathways to Mental Health model, to provide a comprehensive picture of (a) factors that shape help-seeking intention and behavior and (b) the care pathways students follow as they recognize and respond to distress. Written reflections and interviews will result in rich accounts of students’ mental health care pathways, identifying where they stall or move forward in accessing support. Focus groups and surveys will support development and validation of the Engineering Graduate Mental Health Help-Seeking Instrument, used to identify the beliefs most predictive of help-seeking intention and the moderators that determine whether intention leads to action. Project outcomes include: (1) longitudinal evidence on how students navigate distress and informal and formal care, (2) a validated instrument for measuring engineering graduate student help-seeking beliefs, and (3) national and institution-specific reports identifying actionable intervention targets. Ultimately, this work will contribute to building a stronger, more resilient engineering workforce by equipping graduate programs with the knowledge and tools needed to retain talented students and prepare them for long-term success in the profession. This project is supported by NSF’s EDU Core Research (ECR) program. The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that generates foundational knowledge in the field. Investments are made in critical areas that are essential, broad and enduring. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.