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Abstract
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When Buffalo Bills football player Damar Hamlin had cardiac arrest during the team's game on January 2, 2023, the emergency medical response and the decision to cancel the game showed crisis preparedness and sensitivity to the athletes' emotions. Like sports teams, health care teams must be prepared to respond to unexpected critical events. Injury and even untimely death are risks incurred by virtually any worker or professional, including physicians, and one well-documented and concerning risk for physicians is suicide.
According to findings from a survey by The Physicians Foundation, 55% of US physicians know a physician who has considered, attempted, or died by suicide in their career, and 20% of physicians reported knowing a physician who considered, attempted, or died by suicide during the COVID-19 pandemic. A 2021 article in the Journal of Psychiatric Research reported a male to female physician suicide ratio of approximately 2:1. This finding is consistent with a 2020 meta-analysis comparing male and female age-standardized suicide mortality ratios among physicians vs in the general population. From this meta-analysis, physician suicide rates may not seem to differ from those in the general population on a macroscopic level, but some anomalies become apparent when we analyze the data. For example, the National Violent Death Reporting System for 2012 through 2016 found that, although male physicians had a suicide rate on par with men in the general population, female physicians had higher age-adjusted rates of suicide than their counterparts in the general population.
Suicide Prevention
In addition to a physician's sex, a red flag for whether a physician might be at elevated risk for suicide may be the state in which they practice medicine. Physicians may be less likely to seek psychiatric help in states where they must report mental health diagnoses to the medical review board. Additionally, the authors of the article in Mayo Clinic Proceedings reported that nearly 40% of physicians do not report mental illness because they fear it might harm their careers. Of 1 in 16 surgeons surveyed by the American College of Surgeons who reported suicidal thoughts in the past year, more than 60% stated that they hesitated to seek help, fearing it would affect their license. The Federation of State Medical Boards has taken up the issue of mental health disclosure requirements, stating that these requirements may violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. ...
Language: en |