Wellness Center for Graduate Students

Celebrate 50 years of Graduate Student Autonomy and Support the Graduate Assembly’s Wellness Center. We believe in restorative justice and healing justice as avenues to improve Graduate Student Wellbeing!

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The Graduate Assembly’s Wellness Center is the result of a student-led initiative to address holistic wellness as a valid contribution to mitigating hostile campus climate. Students were finding themselves isolated from campus resources that were meant to serve them. The Graduate Assembly has been the initiator of various graduate student initiatives, and continues to create infrastructures that last with graduate student in mind.

The Graduate Assembly Graduate and Professional Student Wellness Center is intended to provide the unique community of graduate and professional students the ability to have access to a confidential counseling space. Currently, Counseling and Psychological Services at Tang serves both the graduate and undergraduate community, and this can sometimes conflict with graduate students need with confidentiality from the students they serve as educators. Other resources such as the Career Center, Student Legal Services and DSP are often over capacitated with serving the undergraduate population that these entities often do not have the bandwidth to cater to graduate student needs. The GA Wellness Center is conceptualized to be a central location that graduate students can come to and receive critical services such as counseling, legal and career support, and general academic accommodations without a significant wait time, since it will only serve graduate students.

Your support can help support this idea of wellness for those pursuing advanced degrees, because campus services assume that undergraduate and graduate students have the same needs, which is not always the case. The Wellness Fund will provide the resources for a reconfiguration of the GA offices in 444 Eshelman. Among the materials that are needed to make the center functional are also funds for programming cost (such as printing, food, etc.). The Wellness fund will go towards general cultivation of the new counseling/healing space and student activity.

Examples of Programming that needs funding: 

1. Facilitating meditation and yoga circles

2. Have trainings of conflict mediation and direct communication

3. Support for our annual meditation retreat

4. Hire a Nutrition Consultant to come an work on Student Diet plans. 

Graduates students at Berkeley have a number of concerns that frequently have not been addressed. Issues related to social support, difficult relationships with faculty, career choices outside of academia, and living conditions, as well as addressing underserved populations, were found to be of of great concern to graduate students. Although there have been efforts to meet some of these needs, an organized Graduate Student Wellness Center would address specific needs and allow for a more efficient system of delivery to meet these needs. In 2014, the Graduate Assembly completed the Graduate Student Happiness and Well-Being Report that concluded that 10% of graduate students have contemplated suicide. After surveying 790 graduate students of UC Berkeley it was concluded that 47% of PhD students have depression and 37% Masters students.The need for a GA Wellness Center addresses growing concerns about graduate student wellbeing in academia. PhD students are 2.8 times more likely to develop mental health problems than university employees that hold a higher education qualification and 2.4 times more likely than degree-holders in the general population (TImes Higher Education 2017). There is a growing need to support graduate students not just with mental health, but overall wellbeing. Since campus services, sometimes does not reach out to this population, the ability to use this service will lift the burden off of graduate students to identify which resources are meant just for them or for the whole campus community. Graduate student’s suffer from high rates of isolation, and this wellness center serves as a one-stop shop to getting supported on not just counseling, but other entities that can help prepare students for life after graduate school.

More information about the Graduate Assembly go to https://ga.berkeley.edu/