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US surgeons are killing themselves at an alarming rate. One decided to speak out
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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She looked out at the audience filled with 2,000 of her peers, surgeons who were attending the annual meeting of the Association of Academic Surgery, a prestigious gathering of specialists from universities across the United States and Canada.For years, no one in surgery talked publicly about mental distress in the profession; surgeons have long experienced a culture of silence when it comes to their personal pain.
“This man created a culture where you lived in the hospital,” says Michael Maddaus, a retired surgeon who developed a narcotics addiction while working as a professor of surgery at the University of Minnesota.
Surgeons often fall into a trap of feeling like what they do “needs to be superhuman because they are the last line of defense, if you will, for a patient”, says Colin West, a professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic who specializes in physician wellbeing.
Lorna Breen, an emergency room doctor in New York, died by suicide in April 2020, after telling her family that she worried she would lose her medical license, or be ostracized by her colleagues, because she was suffering anguish from her work on the front lines of the Covid-19 crisis.
With Barkley’s sister in the front row, Cunningham told her story in full, describing her tennis career and depression, and showed an image of the online message saying she’d been found temporarily unfit for practice.
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