Philippe Buhlmann has been an official mental health advocate for the chemistry department since the advocate program started last fall.

But Buhlmann’s commitment to improving the mental health of his students started four years earlier when he became the department’s director of graduate studies.

“I kind of self-appointed five years ago to make mental health a theme for my tenure,” Buhlmann said. “I wanted the department to talk more openly about the topic. I wanted the department to address it.”

The 52-year-old professor who joined the University faculty in 2000, also credits teaching itself with shaping his commitment.

“Anybody who feels there is a call to teaching kind of wants to help people,” he said. Working with stress and mental health happened later after Buhlmann witnessed the need for it.

One of Buhlmann’s first experiences with mental health problems came when he was an undergraduate student at the Swiss Federal Institute in Zurich. He had a professor who walked out in the middle of class late in the semester due to his depression. “Suddenly he stopped his lectures, said, ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ and he was out,” Buhlmann said.

The year he began at the University of Minnesota as an assistant professor, Buhlmann was teaching a large undergraduate class of 150 students and recalls one student’s breakdown during an exam. He and the teaching assistants had to find outside help, a University of Minnesota police officer, who performed a health check before escorting the student home..

Afterwards, Buhlmann worked with the student and disability services to provide special accommodations, and he said they really worked out well. “I’ve only heard very recently that that student is actually now a practicing M.D.,” he said, “so a real success story. I think that started to sensitize me.”

These experiences led him Buhlmann to focus on mental health, but he realized he would need help from outside the department.

“It was immediately clear that I did not have the expertise,” he said. To remedy that, he worked with Boynton Health Services, organizing a workshop to train the chemistry department to recognize and help with mental health issues. Around 80 department members attended to get the discussion started.

“A lot of graduate students felt that a lot of what was presented was more focused on undergraduate students,” Buhlman said, “and it didn’t really directly address the needs of the graduate students… which, in a sense, is odd because about one third of our students here at the University of Minnesota are either professional or graduate students.”

Buhlmann said graduate students face stresses different from undergraduates. In many disciplines, finding research funding is a major source of stress, whether students are applying for grants or teaching assistant positions. In chemistry, that’s not the largest source of stress.

“What stresses our students is the need to publish,” he said. “That’s huge because that’s kind of the currency in our field.”

About 40 percent of chemistry graduate students go on to become faculty. For those careers it’s often a competition to get published in prominent journals. Success in finding jobs, grants and awards all depend on the quantity as well as the quality of your published work, which Buhlmann said is the “currency” in research fields.

Most chemistry students also spend a lot of hours doing high-pressure lab work. “If the experiment doesn’t work, then you have to go back to point zero,” Buhlmann said. “Your Ph.D. doesn’t progress as fast as you can think.”

Inspired by the Boynton workshop, some graduate students wanted to continue the conversation and carry on the momentum that Buhlmann had helped start.

Zahra Sohrabpour was one of the students who founded the Community of Chemistry Graduate Students, which hosts classes, yoga groups and group runs. She said Buhlmann initiated the group in a sense, but the students were the main drivers.

Because of his advocacy around mental health, Buhlmann was one of the first faculty members approached to participate in the Mental Health Advocate program created by the Provost’s Committee on Student Mental Health in November.

“I think most of us were known to somebody on campus for having done something already,” Buhlmann said.

He said his work as a mental health advocate focuses on two areas: helping students who are already diagnosed and creating an environment that doesn’t aggravate mental health issues. “We’re creating an atmosphere where the unnecessary stresses are eliminated. There’s plenty of stresses we cannot eliminate,” he admitted, “but there are things we can change.”

“He’s been doing this work for a long time,” Boynton Mental Health Clinic assistant director Matt Hanson said of Buhlmann. “It’s really refreshing to see somebody with his professional stature as director of graduate studies that is so passionate about this topic.”

Buhlmann believes the mental health conversation should belong to more than just faculty and professionals. “We have a strong culture in this department of empowering students,” he said, citing student involvement in mentoring and groups including a seminar committee and a diversity committee.

After all of his work in the field, Buhlmann said the conversation about the mental health of graduate and chemistry students is still just beginning. “Especially at the graduate level, we’re just starting to come up with ways to address the problem,” he said. “We’re still figuring out what we could do better.”