At lunch recently, a few of us got into the topic of mental health in medical school. The conversation started when someone brought up the fact that a Harvard College senior and a Harvard Law School student had both recently committed suicide.
We all worried that the medical school wasn’t doing an adequate job caring for students who may be suffering from mental illness. To be fair, University Health Services does provide mental health care and there are fliers posted around offering help for those who are struggling. But I don’t think these go far enough. Someone who has depression or anxiety 1) may not recognize that they have a problem and 2) may not feel the need to seek help. One of the main problems I see is a lack of education and awareness among us med students about the dangers, signs and relevancy of mental illness and how we can best look out for our own peers as well.
This problem is not new nor isolated. Physicians have traditionally experienced higher rates of suicide than the general population – 40% higher for male doctors and a whopping 130% for female doctors. Students who enter medical school with a relatively “normal” mental health profile, in the end, suffer a higher rate of burnout, depression and other mental illnesses. In fact, over the course of med school, up to a quarter of students may suffer from depression and over half from burnout. The reasons for such higher rates include feeling the need to succeed, social isolation, and an unwillingness to show signs of weakness. Unfortunately, many studies have shown that feelings of depression and burnout may lead to unprofessional behaviors and loss of empathy.
Med schools have gotten better at fostering the welfare of their students, but more can be done. Although I’ve only been here for less than a year, there have been times when I’ve felt alone or let the pressure and stress of school get to me. I’m lucky to have close friends whom I can talk to, which, I think, is a great way to address mental health issues. I especially admired a classmate of mine when he shared in tutorial that he suffered from depression in college. It definitely did not make me see him in a lesser light, but rather I felt a strange sense of connection with him.
Schools can bring out into the open a vulnerable issue by increasing awareness and teaching students how to recognize mental illness in themselves and their classmates. By learning how to recognize mental illness, we can help ourselves and others foster a culture where having a mental illness is not synonymous with being weak and where we all work together to make sure our classmates are ok.
Eric Lu is a medical student who blogs at Elusions.
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