The purpose of this study is to understand the decision-making process that graduate students engage in when deciding whether to withhold or disclose information about mental health to their academic advisors. Guided by the principles of the phronetic iterative approach and Communication Privacy Management Theory, a thematic analysis of open-ended survey responses from 81 participants currently enrolled in graduate education revealed several privacy boundary rules used to determine whether to disclose private health information with advisors. Graduate students in this study enacted three motivational criteria (i.e., "help-seeking," "transparency," and "relationship-building"), two contextual criteria (i.e., "relational closeness" and "relevance"), and four risk-benefit ratios (i.e., "anticipated advisor response," "stigma," "student emotional response," and "advisor mental health") in creating privacy rule boundaries. These rules are discussed in terms of both theoretical and practical implications for the graduate student mental health crisis in the United States.