Familial and Parental Relationships Can Ease Anxiety Among Academics in the United States

Anxiety among academic faculty remains a critical yet understudied public health concern because of comorbidity with depression and other mental health disorders. Here, we present a large study examining faculty anxiety, analyzing data from 2,106 professors across 62 U.S. higher education institutions using the Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7) assessment. This comprehensive dataset revealed previously unknown patterns in how familial relationships and academic lineage influence faculty anxiety. The analysis in this work focused on faculty members who are not in a health profession, The exclusion of health profession faculty members in this study is important because compared to non-health profession faculty members, they experience a distinct set of mental health challenges which are exacerbated by clinical practice. Our analysis uncovered a clear relationship between academic rank and anxiety levels, with tenure-track assistant professors showing the highest anxiety scores (predicted GAD-7 = 7.9) compared to full professors. Although academic discipline explains only 0.32% of anxiety variance, we identify institutional factors and family support as major moderators of faculty mental health. We find that close family relationships significantly moderated anxiety across institution types, with particularly strong protective effects at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) / Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), b = −4.24, p = .015 and public institutions, b = −1.11, p = .027. These findings address a crucial gap in understanding faculty mental health and suggest that institutions should implement targeted interventions focusing on reinforcing social support systems, particularly for early-career academics.