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

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.