How is depression viewed by ADCOMS

[southpawcannon]

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as in if you have had a bad semester or taken time off from school or work in order to get the depression under control?

 

[DrMidlife]

I think you can be honest with adcoms about it IF you have a good story for how you've done hard work to overcome it and you'll know what to do if it happens again without needing to take time off of school. So being on meds or knowing already what meds work for you, or knowing that exercise and service are key to your emotional stability.

If you DON'T have a handle on it, and you don't know what happened or why or whether it'll happen again or what you'll do and you're just hoping for the best, then (a) think hard about whether that's going to set you up for success in med school and (b) definitely don't bring it up.

That said, it seems to me that every med student gets depressed, at least during residency.

 

[Law2Doc]

That said, it seems to me that every med student gets depressed, at least during residency.

To hammer home this point -- med school is a really bad place to be if you are prone to depression. You will often be isolated, have no free time to decompress, will be sleep deprived, will in later years have times when you don't get to see daylight, you will be surrounded by death, disease, emotional things that pull your heart strings. Many relationships in med school fail, and many friendships will fall by the wayside due to lack of time. Physicians and med students have fairly high suicide, depression and substance abuse rates. So make sure you are really really in control of everything before you go down this road. It's a bear.

 

[Skialta]

I have the opinion that if you have some form of psychiatric disorder it is most likely to become apparent at some point in your medical career whether that be medical school, residency or in practice. I think a lot of it stems from the lack of free time, pressure to take care of the sick as opposed to being the sick, etc. I have seen several classmates deal with these problems.... I would think long and hard about the decision; at the same time physicians are people too with a normal breadth of disease present.