Suicide rates for Vets

[Saffine]

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They are all relevantant articles. The second one down by Platt is a review of all studies which shows the risk is at least three times the normal population. In the UK it was shown to be four times in the Bartram Veterinary Record article which analyses death certificates. Dentists fall lower at two times the normal population, also listed in Bartram article.

 

[bayarea15]

My former vet committed suicide, with euthanasia he had drawn up himself. I won't say anymore but to say I believe the stats.

 

[thundercatfish]

haha, seriously? Dentists? haha

Yup! 'Cause no one is ever happy to see them. 🙁 That would get really depressing I think. However, I love my dentist, especially when he hooks me up with craploads of novicaine. Love him! hah😀

 

[pooter]

Plenty of academic articles on how vets have higher suicide rates than dentists, see pubmed:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=veterinarian stress suicides

or
USA Today Veterinary Suicide
http://www.usatoday.com/life/lifestyle/pets/2010-04-02-dolittler02_ST_N.htm

It's always nice when someone new drops by and bumps an old thread just to tell us that we're all gonna die sad and lonely.

 

[New Foundland]

It's always nice when someone new drops by and bumps an old thread just to tell us that we're all gonna die sad and lonely.

No convincing evidence that the suicide rates are much different than most other health professionals in NA. All the hype is from a couple UK and aussie studies which don't necessarily generalize to the whole world.


And anyhow, most suicide attempts in general are unsuccessful..

And I'm not trying to be funny when I say this: Vets are pretty much the absolute most knowledgeable people about how to kill an animal painlessly. So they likely have the highest "success" rate for suicide attempts among any profession.
I'd venture to say it would be substantially higher than every other profession, even health professions.
So then if you want to know which profession is most depressed, you'd presumably want to look at the percentage of members of a profession that have attempted suicide, not just the successful attempts.
you can't use raw "cause of death by profession" figures to make inferences about depression.

I'm not saying depression in vets isn't a problem, surely it is.. You just are going to need valid data in order to make the case that we are much worse off than any other given health profession.

 

[BlacKAT33]

I hate when I start reading a thread and then I see a comment I made and realize this is old lol

I agree with everyone who mentioned that we can easily access drugs for an easy "permanent sleep" to put it nicely. I didn't read the papers, but I wonder if they separate the reasons behind the suicides...I'm sure a lot won't have reasoning. IMO I don't include someone who just wants to take their life because they are terminally ill or suffered or old etc etc as part of the suicide numbers. Yes it may be suicide, but it is completely diff than what people think right away--depressed and hate their life.

If I were ill and in severe pain....I don't know how long I'd be willing to wait out my death :-/ its something most people/vet students won't think about in their young healthy age!

And if these articles do take into account what i talked about above, please tell me. I dont have time to read these now

 

[bunnity]

It's always nice when someone new drops by and bumps an old thread just to tell us that we're all gonna die sad and lonely.

It's a little weird, yeah, but being up front about suicide makes it less likely to happen, so I'd rather people discuss it than not, you know?

 

[bayarea15]

It's always nice when someone new drops by and bumps an old thread just to tell us that we're all gonna die sad and lonely.

I think its better to talk about things, and raise awareness...suicide is a very real issue, veterinary related or not...just my two cents....

 

[dvmdreamer]

I wonder how many of these suicides are rationalized euthanasia? not to get into ethical debates but...

But I took a human biomedical ethics class in which we studied a case of a equine vet from Alabama, I believe. He had ALS, and wanted not to die by suffocating on his own saliva, but by the compassionate end he gave his patients. He was particularly distressed because to inject euthanasia solution, he would have to die before he absolutely had to (for anyone who doesn't know, ALS causes progressive paralysis starting at the feet and working its way up).

Just saying... maybe the stats aren't as scary as they sound. Maybe some people with terminal illnesses are taking advantage of drugs they have access to. Which at this point in our law, still counts as suicide.

 

[New Foundland]

I wonder how many of these suicides are rationalized euthanasia? not to get into ethical debates but...

But I took a human biomedical ethics class in which we studied a case of a equine vet from Alabama, I believe. He had ALS, and wanted not to die by suffocating on his own saliva, but by the compassionate end he gave his patients. He was particularly distressed because to inject euthanasia solution, he would have to die before he absolutely had to (for anyone who doesn't know, ALS causes progressive paralysis starting at the feet and working its way up).

Just saying... maybe the stats aren't as scary as they sound. Maybe some people with terminal illnesses are taking advantage of drugs they have access to. Which at this point in our law, still counts as suicide.

I was thinking about this as well.. A rough indicator of this would probably be an older average age for suicides than in the general population. I wouldn't speculate as to whether this is the case, but it'd be interesting if the data were available (and it probably is available somewhere)

Also, I've thought about this:
Males are something like 4 times as likely as females to commit suicide..
Many health professional fields have been Male-dominated for the greater part of the last half-century. The past decade's turn towards female-dense classes would be too recent to affect something like suicide demographics (since most of the past decade's graduates are too young)..

So if controlled for the effects of gender on suicide rate, would the discrepancy between suicide rate in the general population and in the health professional population be so incredibly pronounced?


There's a lot to think about with regards to these issues. It's not as clear cut as people make it seem. And I don't mean to suggest we should pretend the problem doesn't exist. Just that there are short-comings in the data and the problem is not necessarily as awful as most people think.

 

[pooter]

I think its better to talk about things, and raise awareness...suicide is a very real issue, veterinary related or not...just my two cents....

And I absolutely agree with you on the importance of the issue. I'm not saying we shouldn't be talking about it. I just find it strange that a new member created an account just to bump three old threads--two about employment and salary issues in Australia and one about suicide--all in the space of three hours and hasn't been heard from since. Maybe ze is genuinely concerned and trying to stimulate discussion, but something about hir posts just strikes me as . . . strange.

I'm very sorry to hear about your vet. I hope you didn't take my comment as an attempt to minimize that. Never my intention.

 

[New Foundland]

I just find it strange that a new member created an account just to bump three old threads

At least they never did what CamCam did...
Camcam bumped an old thread, and then criticized a forum member who hasn't posted in two years for not reading CamCam's 2011 post before making their 2009 post..

I don't wonder why she's not around anymore

 

[lostbunny]

"Veterinarians in Australia have one of the highest expected suicide rates among other professions. A study in the Australian Veterinary Journal published by Wiley-Blackwell finds that vets are four times more likely to commit suicide as compared to the general adult population- thus highlighting the need for a thorough investigation into the rate of suicide and its contributing factors. "