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January 17, 2011 — An anonymous survey of US surgeons finds that about 1 in 16 had suicidal thoughts in the past year, yet few sought help from a mental health professional.
"The fact that 6% of US surgeons thought of killing themselves in the last 12 months is certainly very concerning," Tait D. Shanafelt, MD, director of the Mayo Clinic Department of Medicine Program on Physician Well-Being, Rochester, Minnesota, told Medscape Medical News.
High-risk profession: Suicide rate of U.S. doctors is one per day
More than a quarter of primary care doctors reported being “burnt out,” in part due to worsening time pressures and a chaotic work pace, which were “strongly associated with low physician satisfaction.”
300-400 doctors in the United States kill themselves every year, or roughly 1 per day. Male doctors have suicide rates 1.4 times that of the general population, while female doctors have twice the rate of depression and 2.3 times the suicide rate when compared with women who are not physicians.
References:
Help for Today’s Tense, Frustrated Doctors. Medscape, 2009.
Originally posted by soficrow
But what I find MOST interesting is that it's almost impossible to find "suicide rates by profession." That didn't use to be the case. Wonder why it changed?
Originally posted by Krusty the Klown
Originally posted by soficrow
But what I find MOST interesting is that it's almost impossible to find "suicide rates by profession." That didn't use to be the case. Wonder why it changed?
The place to find out is a life insurance company, actuaries calculate life insurance premiums based on the likelihood of an event happening, so they must get these stats from somewhere.
In Australia we have the Dept of Births, Deaths and Marriages, maybe the life companies get their stats from the equivalent in each country they operate in.
Originally posted by deadred
I spent most of my adult working directly with surgeons in the Operating Room and in Specialty Clinics, and I know this life firsthand. Everyone talks about all the money they make, and the dysfunctional personalities many seem to have, but you oughta have to walk a mile in their shoes. How much money would any of you demand for working 60-70 hours a week year in and year out? The general public has no clue about the kind of stress these people work under. Call is generally shared a week at a time, and you have to answer every phone call without exception. Say your clinic starts at 8am. You will see anywhere from 20-40 patients in the morning, and you must dictate on the charts of every one. If you have a patient with a difficult problem, particularly if it is a first time visit, you're looking at putting yourself 30-45 minutes behind schedule right off the bat. Believe me, there are days that you can easily have two or three of these kinds of patients in one morning. Say you get a couple of calls from the ER about a very sick or injured patient requesting consultation, and you're pushing being three hours behind schedule. The best surgeons operate a lot because they are in demand. Now it's 1:15pm and you have a difficult operation scheduled at 1pm. The Operating Room is pissed off at you because your lateness is screwing up their schedule, so you have the OR secretary order lunch for you and your assistant, but you only get ten minutes to gulp it down. The surgery finally begins at 2:15, as the patient has to be anesthetized, put on the table, prepped, and draped. About 4pm the ER calls again with a broken bone that needs to be fixed, or if you are a general surgeon, a ruptured appendix. If your surgery is finished by 5pm, you still have to dictate the procedure and talk to the family. Before you go to the ER, you slug back a coke because you gotta keep moving or you'll neve get done. It is now 6pm. Somewhere in this mess of a day, you have to make rounds on your patients in the hospital, many of whom are unhappy because it's so late in the day. You can't just put it off 'till tomorrow. Then you have to dictate on the charts of each patient you saw on rounds. You finally get ready to call it a day (and this really happens) as you slip on your coat your beeper goes off, or the nurse says there is a call for you. Being on call, you must answer. It doesn't matter it's pushing 9pm.
No wonder such a percentage of surgeons are having suicidal ideation. Remember, it's only Monday, and there are 6 days left in your call rotation.