Creation of a “distress” tag

Question

I'm proposing to create a distress tag. This would address the questions posted by users who are mainly in some sort distress associated with academic pressure.

The following are few of the questions that I think would fit this tag:

• Level of difficulty of exams in math PhD and anxiety over being able to do well
• How should I deal with discouragement as a graduate student?
• I don't want to kill any more mice, but my advisor insists that I must in order to get my PhD
• What can I do to recover from a short term burnout?
• My student told me his mother has cancer, what do I do?

There are a couple of users who seem to answer this question better than others do. Most of these questions relate to life advice in academia. Much of these do not directly relate to academia but is an integral part of it nonetheless.

So, what do you think about adding this tag?

Answer 1

I don't think it would be useful. Tags are useful when they are specific, classify a type of question that isn't classified well by existing tags, clearly describe one distinct category well, and it's easy and unambiguous to decide when to apply them. distress does not seem to qualify.

For questions about feeling distress or other similar emotion, we already have emotional-responses. It's a small enough tag that it seems unhelpful to split up into multiple, more specific emotion tags. So: this kind of question is already classified well by existing tags.

For questions that are not about the feeling of distress, but are about practical techniques for dealing with a situation that is distressing (not dealing with the emotion):

• Whether or not to apply this tag seems highly subjective. Who's to say what kind of situation is difficult enough to be worthy of getting the tag? I believe it would be applied very unevenly. (So: not easy/unambiguous to decide when to apply.)
• It would be very broad - a huge number of questions are about someone in a situation that is problematic, as that's a major motivator for asking questions. I think it would be such a broad classification, as to be unuseful most of the time.(So: not specific.)
• This seems like a totally different category of question than the paragraph above (questions about dealing with emotions), I don't see why "I'm in an unusual and difficult situation" and "I feel distress, not necessarily from an unusual situation" should be classified together. (So: not descriptive of one distinct category.)