On one hand, it seems clear that there is a major problem here, and it must be addressed. On the other hand, well, being in healthcare, I will say that this abuse is not just in medicine and medical education. I think what makes it MORE severe for medical students and physicians is the fact that there is this HUGE financial burden loaded on to them. This burden is by no means insignificant. Is it a factor in all med. student and physician suicides? No. Perhaps a few of them didn't have to worry about the otherwise mounting financial burden--and the added stress of succeeding--and what hazing or bad or less than ideal evaluations from "mentors" would mean for them both in the immediate and the long-term. Another resident here, the moderator Q, was talking the other day about the hard realities of spending so much time at a computer or doing things that really have very little to do with what medicine is supposed to be about. Add the hazing, the huge financial burdens, the lessening job satisfaction from governmental hoops and such--add the loss of free-time and many YEARS in the process of becoming a physician--and not knowing how well each step of the process will go for you--or if when you do see the light of day, you will actually find a position that you truly love or at least like. (There are other things, like people are often putting relationships or things such as having a family on hold.) I mean, really, it a lot--and then to be what I call DE-MENTORED--as there seems to be so many in leadership or teaching positions that haven't a clue how to educate the adult learner with respect and dignity--yet the learners are supposed to lead and teach patients and families and other students of medicine with respect and dignity????? (I call those that cannot or will not grasp how to teach or mentor adults with respect DEMENTORS. There were more than a few of them certainly in nursing school and during nursing preceptor programs. It's actually pitiful.) There is something very twisted here.
There are many steps in the process towards creating more wellness; but honestly, one of the first ones must include ways to decrease the financial burden of medical school. Financial burdens and debt can and often enough does play a huge factor in depression and suicide.
Noteworthy Observation from Intelligencer: Are Wall Street Suicide Epidemics Real?
~
According to
Occupation and Suicide, a 2001 work by Dr. Steven Stack of Wayne State University, the riskiest groups are dentists, artists, and certain laborers (physicians also rank high in some studies, perhaps because of their ready access to fatal substances). Even then, occupational stress is only one of the four factors known to contribute to suicide risk, the other three being demographics, “preexisting psychiatric morbidity,” and “differential opportunities for suicide” (e.g., doctors’ access to drugs)...When it comes to suicide statistics for the general population, the picture is clearer, if less cheery. The rise and fall of the Dow isn’t the key factor here;
the health of the overall economy is. [Emphasis mine.] “We’ve been studying suicide cycles for over a century, and there is a nearly linear relationship between the national suicide rate and GDP,” says Dr. M. Harvey Brenner, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. The overall cycle of suicides, he says, “mirrors the economy.” It does so, it bears noting, with a time lag. While there was no nationwide rash of suicides in 1929, rates peaked in 1932, by the time the Great Depression had set in.
Just as the crisis itself takes a while to spread through the system, so does individual misery. [Emphasis mine.] Worse, experts fear that the current financial upheaval could cause more suicides than other downturns. Stack and other researchers suspect that it may be the size of the status change, the mental whiplash, that triggers suicidal behavior. In other words, it’s not where you wind up; it’s how far you fall (Adolf Merckle was still worth over $8 billion, for instance, after the Volkswagen disaster). Given the record number of people who bought homes for the first time and the historic amount of wealth built in the nineties, there could be more mental whiplash than ever this time around as once-fat portfolios thin out and an unprecedented number of people lose their homes.
Not sufficiently depressed? Let’s go back to bankers. Stack recently chanced upon an obscure piece of government research from 1910 (“I found it a week ago; I’m a connoisseur of dusty papers”) that seems to contradict the idea that bear-market banker suicide rashes are a myth. It’s just one study, a century old, but it did break down U.S. suicide statistics, for the year 1908, by the victims’ occupations. Contrary to the since-established patterns, the study found that a group defined as “bankers, brokers, and officials of companies” was at the top of the list, with twice the average rate of suicide. Stack first dismissed the research as a fluke. Then he learned there was a massive Wall Street panic in October of 1907 (Idov, 2009).~
Idov, M. (2009, January 11). Are Wall Street Suicide Epidemics Real? Retrieved September 24, 2014, from
http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/53341/
