Doctoral training requires students to carry out original research, publish their theses, write a dissertation and choose a career within the relatively short period of their studies, thus experiencing anxiety in daily academic life. Based on the disease narrative and theme analysis, this paper encodes the theme of the interview materials of 15 doctoral students who are experiencing or have experienced anxiety, including 6 with hospital diagnosis records and 9 who self-reported anxiety and have been affected in their study and life. The research construct a three-dimensional representation framework of “impaired social function, negative cognition and somatic symptoms”, and explains the generation mechanism of anxiety through five aspects: institutional rigidity, accumulation of individual pressure, planning gap, lack of ability, and weakening of guidance interaction. The results showed that the cases of severe anxiety mainly included learning stagnation, submission avoidance, catastrophic expectations and sleep disorders; high-frequency pressure sources were publishing threshold, ability gap and tutor distance. As shown by the three-dimensional risk surface, a high level of stress caused by work and an overly restrictive institutional environment will lead to an increased anxiety risk; however, if one has good institutional support and self-strength, even in a stressful working environment, this risk will be reduced significantly. To alleviate the anxiety of doctoral students, multiple countermeasures need to be taken simultaneously, including improving personal resilience, strengthening the training system, increasing ability support, building an academic community, and enhancing the psychological service interface; early identification, process feedback and crisis referral should be linked. The research offers a visual evidence chain and an operable intervention framework for the management of doctoral students’ mental health, as well as providing empirical support for colleges and universities to improve the evaluation system of doctoral training.
