Suicide Rate and Stress Among Surgeons

[BoulderSoWhat]

Interesting read. My coworker the other day was cutting out pills from a wrongly packaged card. I'm a pharmacy tech. I randomly asked, "do you think surgery can be relaxing work?" Of course this turned into a hilarious conversation lol, but my curiosity wasn't well worded haha. I was more interested about how surgeons try to achieve a state of flow and resilience besides the obvious stakes. Well after work I wanted to explore my curiosity and found bits and pieces of articles that are interesting and relevant. Thought I would share if anyone is interested:


"For those outside the medical profession, it took a global pandemic to finally understand how pervasive distress and suicide are among medical professionals, particularly surgeons.

For James Harrop, MD, it was made real years earlier by a colleague he'd trained alongside and worked with for decades — "one of the best surgeons I've ever seen" who, one day, just wasn't there.

...Weinstein recovered and later gave grand rounds at Thomas Jefferson University, where he is an associate professor of surgery in the Acute Care Surgery Division. But the story stuck with Harrop.

"I said to Mike afterward, I've known you for 20 years and, retrospectively, going back, I never saw a single sign that you were depressed, sad, or had any issues, and he said to me 'that's because I did everything I could to make sure no one knew I had a problem,'" Harrop said during a talk on physician suicide on May 4 at the recent American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) 2024 Annual Meeting.

"And that scared me because we need to help these people, we need to identify who they are."

Quoted from first link, other interesting links provided.

Suicide in Surgeons: The Toll of a High-Stakes Career

Physicians are more than twice as likely to die by suicide, and surgeons are at particularly high risk due at least in part to the US neurosurgeon shortage.

www.medscape.com

US surgeons are killing themselves at an alarming rate. One decided to speak out

The grueling profession has long kept silent about mental distress. After losing a friend, Carrie Cunningham began telling her own story

www.theguardian.com

https://www.journalofsurgicalresearch.com/article/S0022-4804(21)00036-6/fulltext

Best :)

 

[an alien]

Dentist and Veterinarians also have pretty high suicide rates too. It's honestly heart wrenching how many people out there feel so called to help others that they spend years and years of their life training to help the unwell only for the intense stress and emotional burden of that passion to be the thing that ultimately does them in.

 

[mango-meridian]

I always thought about this with surgeons. How do they deal with the fact that a single minor mistake can ruin someone's life forever or even kill them?

Putting the guilt and stress of that aside, I read/heard they can also be sued for bad surgeries. Of course someone needs to be held to account when this happens, but maybe it shouldn't be individual surgeons, but rather the medical facilities they're a part of. People in most jobs don't get sued for having one bad day. It's only after a pattern emerges that they get fired.

I'm no expert but it seems like after doing this every day for decades on end, you would eventually make a mistake. Especially because some surgeries are very unique so you don't have a great way to "practice". Sigh. I hope we find better solutions eventually. I've heard that some surgeons are now able to practice surgeries via VR but I doubt that's a complete solution.

 

[KuriGohan&Kamehameha]

It's a fictional story, but you might like Naomi Urasawa's Monster. It's about a surgeon who saves a young boy from the brink of death with an operation, only for the boy to grow up and become a serial killer.

 

[ARW3N]

I wonder if there's a connection with doctors, surgeons, dentists and veterinarians having access to lethal drugs and the correct dosages to end life and their high suicide rates.