Not only have I been to the funerals of some of my patients, I’ve also been to the funerals of colleagues. Medically fit and healthy, but who had tragically taken their life by suicide. Something entirely preventable. Alarmingly, the suicide rate amongst doctors is double that of the general population.
We need urgent action to beat an entirely avoidable problem. In this talk, drawing on both my own experience working on the frontline, and a growing body of literature on physician wellbeing, I outline the scale of the problem, and propose some much-needed solutions.
Let’s normalise psychological support to help end this absurdity where healthcare systems are making doctor mentally ill.
There’s a larger conponent to understand prior to mental illness in doctors and it is stress. Stress is an amazing topic and just taken as part and parcel of the norms of a healthcare environment. Staff endure stress relentlessly all while being scrutinised from all directions. It is an environment where if you’re less than 100% right, it’s not good enough and there can be huge consequences. So it’s time to explore this in much more depth in order to prevent the inevitable eventual mental illness if it is continued to be ignored. This can then be applied to any industry/ work place.