Physician suicide is also a problem in India. Here ’s what you can do.

Today a physician told me she lost three colleagues to suicide in the last two months. Loma Linda Hospital just lost three young doctors to suicide in 6 months. Mount Sinai had 3 docs jump in less than 2 years — from the same building. An anesthesiologist recently told me he lost 8 of his colleagues to suicide. Each suicide should be fully investigated, yet few receive root cause analysis of the specific circumstances leading to their deaths. In January, I reported on my investigation into 757 doctor suicides in The Washington Post. (Now I’ve got nearly 900 suicides on my registry.) Recently, Dr. Oz exposed the hidden epidemic and shared his loss of 3 close physician friends to suicide. Since starting a suicide hotline for doctors in 2012, I’ve spoken to thousands of depressed and suicidal physicians. Last evening I spent an hour speaking to an Indian resident who is being bullied relentlessly by her program director at a US hospital. She disclosed, “the working environment is so very toxic that I dread going to hospital every morning. The program killed my joy for medicine. I feel dead inside — empty. I feel like killing my self every single day. Almost every resident I know is on some type of anti-depressant or an ADHD medication.” Fueled in part by bullying, chronic human rights violations, and lack of mental health care, doctor suicide is now a global epidemic. Just last weekend, we lost two young physicians to suicide in India. Ruhi Hathidra, a 26-...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Physician Psychiatry Source Type: blogs