Be Warned!

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"In the United States, the medical field loses the equivalent of a medical school class each year by suicide"

http://www.emedicine.com/med/topic3004.htm

Know what you are getting yourself into!

 

[Nunca]

Suicide is so terrible.

I hope to never know somebody who commits the act.

 

[vikaskoth]

so thats about 150 people, or 30,000 people?

So nunca, you dont care if someone kills themself, just as long as it doesn't affect you, kinda selfish

 

[DrCarebear]

Just food for thought: More people die from suicide than from murders each year in the United States. We need to be aware of this not only for ourselves, but also for our future patients. 🙁

 

[Mitro]

Don't dentists have the highest rate of suicide? So if this concerns you - you might not want to be a dentist either.

 

[docjolly]

Suicide is a terrible thing. When I was at Columbia, at least 6-9 students committed suicide. One of my good friends (who was a senior at the time) took his own life during my sophomore year. He took his own life because he couldn't deal with the guilt over lying to both his family and Columbia about his medical school application. Although his situation is different from what the article discusses, I do think it's important to remember that people, regardless of where they are in life, are in pain. We really dont' know what others are going through when they go home, and it's just the four walls of their bedroom surrounding them. No, we really don't know..

 

[EvoDevo]

Your link doesn't work.

Also, given the numbers of physicians in the country, is the number (~150) statistically significant? What controls are there? How does this figure compare to a similarly-sized group of accountants? Of teenagers? Lawyers?

Take things with a grain of salt.

 

[Fantasy Sports]

According to the article:

* Police or public safety officers are at risk for suicide. The hours of work, the scenes they witness daily, the availability of guns, and the silence encouraged by the profession (keeping within the “wall-of-blue”), as well as alcohol usage and divorces contribute to this risk.

* Physicians, especially those who deal with progressively terminally ill patients, have a high rate of suicide. In the United States, the medical field loses the equivalent of a medical school class each year by suicide.

* Dentists have a high suicide rate. Perhaps, elements of obsessive and perfectionist tendencies combined with personal feelings of isolation may contribute to this high number of self-induced deaths.


I dont know the actual statistics on these groups though...

 

[EvoDevo]

According to the article:

* Police or public safety officers are at risk for suicide. The hours of work, the scenes they witness daily, the availability of guns, and the silence encouraged by the profession (keeping within the “wall-of-blue”), as well as alcohol usage and divorces contribute to this risk.

* Physicians, especially those who deal with progressively terminally ill patients, have a high rate of suicide. In the United States, the medical field loses the equivalent of a medical school class each year by suicide.

* Dentists have a high suicide rate. Perhaps, elements of obsessive and perfectionist tendencies combined with personal feelings of isolation may contribute to this high number of self-induced deaths.


I dont know the actual statistics on these groups though...

Right. They stated nothing more than "what everyone knows." I checked the references at the bottom of the article, and there wasn't anything about physicians and suicide rates.

Doesn't mean that there isn't a problem. Just that we can't assume it's true b/c it feels true.

 

[Mitro]

Behold - the straight dope:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/010420.html

I love this site.

 

[EvoDevo]

Bingo! Found a recent study:

Am J Psychiatry. 2004 Dec;161(12):2295-302. Related Articles, Links
Click here to read
Suicide rates among physicians: a quantitative and gender assessment (meta-analysis).

Schernhammer ES, Colditz GA.

Channing Laboratory, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, 181 Longwood Ave., Boston, MA 02115, USA. [email protected]

OBJECTIVE: Physicians' suicide rates have repeatedly been reported to be higher than those of the general population or other academics, but uncertainty remains. In this study, physicians' suicide rate ratios were estimated with a meta-analysis and systematic quality assessment of recent studies. METHOD: Studies of physicians' suicide rates were located in MEDLINE, PsycINFO, AARP Ageline, and the EBM Reviews: Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews with the terms "physicians," "doctors," "suicide," and "mortality." Studies were included if they were published in or after 1960 and gave estimates of age-standardized suicide rates of physicians and their reference population or reported extractable data on physicians' suicide; 25 studies met the criteria. Reviewers extracted data and scored each study for quality. The studies were tested for heterogeneity and publication bias and were stratified by publication year, follow-up, and study quality. Effect sizes were pooled by using fixed-effects (women) and random-effects (men) models. RESULTS: The aggregate suicide rate ratio for male physicians, compared to the general population, was 1.41, with a 95% confidence interval (CI) of 1.21-1.65. For female physicians the ratio was 2.27 (95% CI=1.90-2.73). Visual inspection of funnel plots from tests of publication bias revealed randomness for men but some indication of bias for women, with a relative, nonsignificant lack of studies in the lower right quadrant. CONCLUSIONS: Studies on physicians' suicide collectively show modestly (men) to highly (women) elevated suicide rate ratios. Larger studies should help clarify whether female physicians' suicide rate is truly elevated or can be explained by publication bias.

 

[Shaz]

When I was at Columbia, at least 6-9 students committed suicide.

6-9? That's an epidemic.

I wonder what it feels like to get to the point where you tell yourself, "man, death is better than this." I mean, I can understand how someone can say that when they're being tortured or when they're seeing a loved one being tortured, but it is a more complicated issue when it is something so trivial as a medical school application.

You gotta have pretty big honcha's to pull the trigger.

 

[Singing Devil]

The OP has posted similar "sky is falling" messages on the postbacc forum. Evidently, he/she has known several suicidal/clinically depressed medical students:

"Well, lets see, a med student classmate of mine lept off a building, another resident I knew blew his brains out in an ortho fellowship and to top it off, a good friend in my residency lept off a bridge. Saw 2 residents committed to the psych ward and their state lic. revoked. Yeah, this rocks! I was in the military and didnt see that degree of causalities."

I am sure it must be traumatic to see so many of one's colleagues do damage to themselves, and then to question the motivation to practice medicine, but I, for one, do not have any doubt about my desire to make the world a better place, and I sincerely don't think that the stress of being a competent physician is going to make me jump off a building; my father is a minister, and trust me, you have no idea how stressful that profession can be, nor how many people who pursue it become unstable. I think any profession that has high stress has the possibility to push people, but so many, many, many professions have high stress.

Besides, isn't it possible, if not probable, that it is not the case that medicine makes people suicidal, but rather that people who are likely to push themselves so hard to succeed that they become unstable are more likely to enter certain professions, medicine being one of them. I am more likely to believe the latter.

Think about all the pre-med gunners you know... do you think they would actually be happy mowing lawns and sweeping floors? Isn't the pressure what excites/motivates them? And aren't these the types who are probably most likely to break if they hit a wall (although, obviously we're talking small percentages here).

 

[Nunca]

So nunca, you dont care if someone kills themself, just as long as it doesn't affect you, kinda selfish

I didn't even SUGGEST anything like that.

Its obviously terrible when ANYONE kills themselve. I was just saying that I don't ever want to be in the position to be heavily affected by a suicide.

 

[indo]

I read that something like 1 in 5 teenagers has considered suicide. That is scary if you're a parent and believable if you are in that 20%.

 

[sacrament]

so thats about 150 people, or 30,000 people?

So nunca, you dont care if someone kills themself, just as long as it doesn't affect you, kinda selfish

And furthermore, the subtext of nunca's post, which you seem to have overlooked, is that he hates women and the crippled. It's shameful.

 

[indo]

Sometimes, diarrhea resulting from consuming too much lactose makes me want to die.

plbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbt, plop.