[0] https://padailypost.com/2019/02/16/engineering-student-found...
I know it sounds tangential, but this does resonate with my own roundabout way of going from studies -> work and the gross lack of fundamental science companies in Africa as a whole. I did not have depression, but rather my own cocktail of problems as a student, and a lot of it (at least for me) stemmed from clear dissonance between your current situation and an inability to anticipate a future self that is acceptable to your current self.
With depression, the situation is similar and more importantly, you become more and more subjective and people outside your situation are needed, as probably is medication, to bring you back to personal assonance with what you want in life.
The article doesn't say what the reasons were, so Wang may have had different reasons.
But there is certainly a process for handling advisor-advisee issues at a big school like Stanford:
You are in a foreign country, with no friends, no family, working over time, in some places extremely little money.
If you are burnout the first thing that you need to do is to stop. Make friends and lovers, travel and work outside for a year or so.
To use medication or drugs is not going to solve your problems,if you continue living such an unnatural lifestyle.
And I said that having lived that lifestyle myself, but I took my breaks from the toxic system.
When I went to university I ended in deep debt.
Took me years, to pay off that debt, it felt like literal slavery, since I would just take whatever job that could pay the debt that was offered (I had to decline many jobs because their pay was lower than my debt, meaning taking them I would just stay in debt forever), and then I would stay until I was fired or had to quit.
Even then, those were not "real" jobs according to our government, in my country my "real" job registry, is empty, I never "worked", because I never got hired full-time legally, I couldn't afford to, whatever people offered that the pay was good enough, I would accept, even if the employer was obviously hiring me as "freelancer" just to not pay taxes.
The times I had burned out during this, I had to keep going, travelling for a year? I dunno if I will ever afford that. Making friends? How? When? I am not in a foreign country yet I have two friends at most, and one of them moved to another country and I see him once every 5 years.
So it is not like people have a choice after they went to college, I still feel that going to college was the biggest mistake I ever did on my life, I should never have went, and never took that debt, it is paid now, but I am working with Marketing, instead of working with programming, and have little room for error, no debt, but no surplus either, if something goes wrong with the business I am screwed.
> to pay off that debt, it felt like literal slavery
This is what I feel is almost criminal about systematically committing university students to years-long debt. Education shouldn't have to be traded for years of someone's life - especially when most of the labor market expects them to have at least a degree.
I think the root of the problem is deeper than education (as a business) though - it's how society is organized. To have a minimum standard of living, one must eat every day and have a place to stay - which is already a kind of debt, a constant need for money. Poor people are essentially enslaved to dead-end jobs, just to be able to survive.
Hopefully, in a sensible/utopian future, we will look back on this social arrangement as barbaric, inhumane and uncivilized. Until then, best of luck navigating, adapting, flourishing despite the setbacks.
But this ignores that the source of the problem could be brain chemistry itself. Or at least that it is part of the problem. If it were situational only, everyone in the same situation would have the same outcome. But the physical structure and chemical cocktail of each individual brain plays a huge role in how those situations affect each person. The brain is an organ, and just like any other organ, there are situations that cannot be fixed with “lifestyle changes”. Medication should not just be hand waved away.
And my comment there. And also my comment here (which links to more): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21629112
A good resource on suicide prevention: https://www.metanoia.org/suicide/ "When pain exceeds pain-coping resources, suicidal feelings are the result. Suicide is neither wrong nor right; it is not a defect of character; it is morally neutral. It is simply an imbalance of pain versus coping resources. You can survive suicidal feelings if you do either of two things: (1) find a way to reduce your pain, or (2) find a way to increase your coping resources. Both are possible."
A Basic Income could make a big difference to make it possible for people to live a graduate student lifestyle without the stress of navigating the social dysfunction of many (not all) graduate programs...