"Compared with other health professionals and the general population, doctors and medical students reported higher rates of psychological distress, burnout, diagnosed mental illness, suicidal ideation and attempted suicide."-
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26813903
Look, to offset the misinformation here, enjoy:
Suicide Attempts
In the United States, lifetime prevalence of a suicide attempt in adults is 4.6 percent, with about 0.5 percent of adults reporting attempting suicide in the past year.1,15 The 12-month prevalence for suicide attempts is higher at 1.2 percent in younger adults (ages 18 to 25 years).16 Despite the fact that men are more likely to die from suicide, women have a greater lifetime prevalence of suicide attempts than men.1 When asked to rate the seriousness of their attempt, however, men and women had similar rates of attempts during which they truly intended to die. The odds of inflicting self-harm without a true intent of dying was almost three times higher for women than men.17 Suicide attempt risk is increased in sexual minorities; most analyses report at least an 80 percent increase in risk, and several report more than double that risk.18 Interestingly, male veterans did not report higher rates of suicide attempts than civilians on the 2008 National Survey on Drug Use and Health.19
https://www.researchgate.net/profil...physicians/links/0c96051ccc800bf761000000.pdf
Results: An estimated 1.5% (N=61) of U.S. women physicians have attempted suicide, and 19.5% (N=808) have a history of depression. Those who were born in the United States, were not Asian, had histories of cigarette smoking, alcohol abuse or dependence, sexual abuse, domestic violence, poor current mental health, more severe harassment, or a family history of psychiatric disorders were significantly more likely to report suicide attempts or depression. Depression was more common among those who were not partnered, were childless, had a household gun, had more stress at home, drank alcohol, had worse health, or had a history of obesity, chronic fatigue syndrome, substance abuse, an eating disorder, or another psychiatric disorder and among those who reported working too much, career dissatisfaction, less control at work, and high job stress. Strata reporting higher rates of depression tended to show higher (although usually nonsignificant) rates of suicide attempts. Conclusions: Depression is approximately as common among U.S. women physicians as among other U.S. women, but suicide attempts may be fewer. A number of conditions may help identify women physicians at high risk for suicide attempts and depression.
Basically, women in the general population attempt suicide more than men in the general population. Male and female physicians attempt suicide at equal rates with equal completion rates (we're egalitarian like that). Female physicians attempt suicide at a far lower rate than the general population (but are better at it- the ones that attempt suicide tend to die). If the prevalence of female suicide attempts is lower in physicians than the general population, it stands to reason that the number of male physician suicide attempts are similarly low (with similarly successful results for those that do actually complete suicide).
Again, this is just an example, but the gist is that this has all been discussed before, and if you dig into any of the data, physician suicide rates look awful because we're good at ending life because we know how it works.
That's what makes me curious though. It's well documented that a large percent of suicide attempts are a cry for help and that those attempting the act don't intend on actually dying. So do we have higher success rates because we're more medically knowledgable and a higher percentage of people that really want to die succeed, or is it because more docs actually intend to die when attempting suicide? I don't expect a researched response, but I think it's a point worth bringing up as it addresses the severity of the individual's mental state and potentially underlying issues within the system.
At least you've taken the first step...
Physicians aren't into the whole "cry for help" thing. We're planners that think things through. If we attempt something, we probably put a lot of thought into it (the sort of thought that goes behind pursuing a path that takes 11+ years of education to get to). We don't swallow half a dozen Tylenols and call an ambulance. We go Hunter S. Thompson and make sure there's no way in hell we'll be alive because we have determined that life is objectively no longer worth ending and we have made a conscious decision to terminate that life. Maybe it's easier because we've seen death. Maybe it's easier because physicians, on average, tend to be less religious than the general population and thus have both seen death and believe there's nothing else on the other side, so why not if your life is awful, you know? There's a lot of other factors that go into it, but truthfully, I think that it's very much to do with the
type of people that go into medicine, not medicine itself. Medicine draws in a very different crowd than most other fields, and there's no way of objectively proving that crowd wouldn't have done the same thing in investment banking or working 60+ hours as a middle manager somewhere or whatever else. There's a few studies out there based in the UK and
Australia that have shown a positive correlation between intelligence and suicide- something about Anglo culture seems to make that correlation stick, where it doesn't in Nordic nations.
Whatever though, who knows. The point is it's an issue, but it's not an issue I find to be any bigger than suicide in the general population- we're not special snowflakes, we kill ourselves just like everyone else. We're just better at it, because we know what we're doing.