Physician burnout: what physicians say, in their own words

Last updated September 20, 2026.

Read together, the 585 essays and podcast transcripts on this page say one thing consistently across seventeen years: physicians locate the cause of burnout in the conditions of work, not in themselves. They name administrative load, the electronic health record, productivity metrics, and loss of control over how care is delivered. Since 2018 a growing number have argued that burnout is the wrong word for that injury, and since 2024 the sharpest argument has been that most interventions add programs without removing work.

This page is a maintained record of what physicians have written about burnout on KevinMD.com, a physician-authored publication founded in 2004 by Kevin Pho, MD, a board-certified internal medicine physician in Nashua, New Hampshire. It draws on 585 essays and podcast transcripts with burnout in the title, published between July 2009 and September 2026, written by 361 named contributors, 408 of them by physicians. Every claim on this page is attributed to a named author with the date it was published and a link to the original.

The record shows a conversation that changed shape. In 2009, KevinMD published five posts with burnout in the title, most of them short pointers at survey data. In 2018 and 2019 it published 46 a year. By 2026 it had published 87 in the first nine months, and the writers had largely stopped asking whether burnout is real and started arguing about whether the word itself is right and about which interventions remove work rather than add programs.

The sections below are organized around the questions physicians, administrators, and journalists ask. Each opens with a direct answer, followed by what named physicians have said, in the order they said it. This is a page about physician opinion and experience, not a clinical guideline. Where authors cite outside studies, the study is named alongside the author.

How do physicians define burnout?

Physicians on KevinMD use two definitions and argue with both. The older one is Christina Maslach’s, first published in 1981 and measured by the Maslach Burnout Inventory, which describes burnout as three components: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization or cynicism, and a low sense of personal accomplishment. The newer one is the World Health Organization’s, which in 2019 classified burnout in ICD-11 as an occupational phenomenon rather than a medical condition, defined as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.

Diane W. Shannon, MD, MPH, wrote in April 2019 that while burnout is used informally to mean fatigue or boredom, psychologists define it as “emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and inefficacy, or a low sense of personal accomplishment in one’s work,” in “Innovative approaches to solve physician burnout.” Hans Duvefelt, MD, a family physician, wrote in April 2016 that the Maslach Burnout Inventory “was first associated with high-stress positions in the service sector,” and that “there is even an ICD-10 diagnostic code for burnout,” in “Burnout is a consequence of the deprofessionalization of medicine.” Arthur Lazarus, MD, MBA, a psychiatrist, wrote in December 2023 that ICD-11 defines burnout as an occupational phenomenon “rather than a mental health disorder,” in “Burnout on the U.S.S. Enterprise.”

Chetan Wasekar, MD, wrote in October 2023 that it “irks me that burnout has its own ICD-11 code (QD85)” when the toxic workplace is the disease that needs a code, in “Are health care workers being gaslit about burnout?” Perrette St. Preux, RN, MScPH, argued the opposite in October 2025, writing that the WHO definition “places all the responsibility on the job” and overlooks the exhaustion people carry before work begins, in “Why non-work stress fuels burnout.” Harsha Moole, MD, wrote in September 2026 that Maslach “defined it as three separate pieces,” and that workload predicts the exhaustion piece while autonomy predicts who leaves, in “Physician autonomy predicts who leaves, not exhaustion.”

What share of physicians report burnout, and is it getting worse?

Surveys cited by KevinMD authors between 2013 and 2026 put self-reported physician burnout between 42 and 63 percent, depending on the survey, the year, and whether the measure is “burned out” or “at least one symptom of burnout.” The figures below are the ones KevinMD authors cited, with the survey each named and a link to the post that cited it. They are not KevinMD’s own data, and the definitions differ across surveys, which is why the numbers do not form a single trend line.

Survey year Figure Survey named Cited on KevinMD by
2011 and 2014 45 percent, then 54 percent with at least one symptom Mayo Clinic and AMA, about 7,000 physicians Diane W. Shannon, MD, MPH, December 2015
2013 About 50 percent in emergency medicine, critical care, and family medicine Medscape 2013 report Karen S. Sibert, MD, August 2013
2018 42 percent Medscape Tomi Mitchell, MD, June 2023
2019 44 percent Medscape National Physician Burnout, Depression and Suicide Report Daniel Berger, November 2019
2020 42 percent, sample of more than 15,000 Medscape Auston Stiefer, July 2020
2021 63 percent with burnout symptoms American Medical Association Yimdriuska Magan Mendoza, MD, MPH, November 2023
2022 60 percent in emergency medicine, 56 percent in critical care, 13,000 physicians Medscape Robert Pearl, MD, May 2022
2023 53 percent Medscape Tomi Mitchell, MD, June 2023
2023 45 percent; 45.2 percent with at least one symptom AMA national survey; Mayo and Stanford survey Bill Pressey, April 2026; Harsha Moole, MD, September 2026
2024 49 percent burned out, 20 percent depressed, 9,000 physicians Medscape Physician Burnout and Depression Report Susan Landers, MD, June 2024
2024 60 percent with frequent feelings of burnout Physicians Foundation Justin Nabity, CFP, July 2025
2025 62 percent Medscape Physician Burnout and Depression Report Kayvan Haddadan, MD, April 2026

Two cautions recur in the essays. Bill Pressey wrote in April 2026 that the AMA’s 2023 figure of 45 percent is “nearly identical to where we started” after a peak of 62.8 percent in 2021, in “Why current solutions to physician burnout are failing.” Kayvan Haddadan, MD, wrote in April 2026 that the 2025 Medscape report found “62 percent of physicians reported burnout,” with bureaucratic work and electronic health records “consistently ranking as the top two contributors,” in “Administrative burden is driving severe physician burnout.”

What do physicians say causes burnout?

Physicians writing on KevinMD overwhelmingly locate the cause of burnout in the conditions of work rather than in the physician: administrative load, the electronic health record and its inbox, productivity metrics, and loss of control over how care is delivered. Across the 585 posts, the share that describe burnout in systemic terms rose from 41 percent in 2009 to 2014 to 79 percent in 2024 to 2026, and the share discussing administrative burden rose from 36 percent to 61 percent over the same period.

Rob Lamberts, MD, a primary care physician, wrote in October 2012 that complying with coding requirements, meaningful use rules, and “increasingly invasive rules around prescribing controlled drugs makes me nauseated,” in “10 reasons for physician burnout.” Sid Schwab, MD, a retired surgeon, wrote in February 2014 that control was the dominant theme in his own burnout, with rules, forms, and penalties arriving “literally almost weekly by the latter years of my career,” in “Physician burnout: The additive effect of bureaucracy on the psyche.”

Starla Fitch, MD, an ophthalmologist, wrote in March 2016 that “it makes me crazy when I hear things like, doctors are to blame for burnout,” and that it starts “with being told that we need to see twice as many patients in half the time to cover overhead,” in “No, doctors aren’t to blame for burnout.” Jerina Gani, MD, MPH, wrote in November 2025 that “working harder in medicine is making us as doctors poorer, and it’s quietly harming patients too,” after years of seeing patients every 15 to 20 minutes, in “Physician income vs. burnout: Why working harder fails.”

Paul DeChant, MD, MBA, wrote in August 2017 that physicians spend two hours on administrative work for every hour with a patient and take hours of work home each night, and that the electronic health record drives burnout through more than added work, including administrative decisions about EHR support that “seem to be directed at physicians,” in “How does the EHR drive burnout? Let’s count the ways.” Philip A. Masters, MD, writing for the American College of Physicians in November 2019, called administrative burden “a primary driver of the loss of joy in the practice of medicine,” in “How the administrative burden contributes to physician burnout.”

Justin Nabity, CFP, wrote in July 2025 that hospital employment was sold to physicians as relief from administrative burden and instead left many “overworked, undervalued, and constrained by systems that prioritize efficiency over autonomy,” citing the Physicians Foundation 2024 report that 60 percent of physicians report frequent burnout, in “Why hospital jobs are failing physicians: burnout, pay, and lost autonomy.” Jeffrey Shuhaiber, MD, a cardiac surgeon, wrote in June 2026 that “Hospitals increasingly operate as massive corporate enterprises,” in which relative value units govern “the cadence of our daily lives,” and proposed the term administrative harm for patient risk created by prior authorizations, peer-to-peer reviews, and documentation rules that delay care, in “Administrative harm is the burnout we don’t measure.”

Amir Atabeygi, MD, MHA, and Christina Mitchell, MHA, wrote in August 2026 that most burnout interventions remove no work, since “Test results still arrive, patients still send messages, refills and forms still accumulate,” and an intervention that does not reduce inbox volume, simplify documentation, or move routine tasks away from clinicians has not addressed the cause, in “Most physician burnout interventions remove no work.” Harsha Moole, MD, wrote in September 2026 that among physicians with poor control over their work “the odds of intending to leave their organization were about twice as high,” even after accounting for burnout itself, in “Physician autonomy predicts who leaves, not exhaustion.” Sarah Whaley wrote the same month that institutional responses keep adding “more dashboards, more surveys, more training modules, more wellness initiatives,” and that these “address the consequences of structural overload rather than the overload itself,” in “The structural causes of burnout no dashboard captures.”

Is burnout the right word? Physicians disagree.

Physicians on KevinMD disagree about whether burnout is the right term. Since 2018, a growing group has argued that “burnout” locates the problem in the physician, and has proposed moral injury, erosion, or exploitation instead. Others argue that replacing the word makes the problem harder to fix inside institutions. The phrase “moral injury” appears in no KevinMD burnout post before 2018 and in roughly one in seven posts from 2024 to 2026.

Wendy Dean, MD, and Simon G. Talbot, MD, wrote in August 2018 that physicians, like combat soldiers, face “a profound and unrecognized threat to their well-being: moral injury,” and that without understanding the difference between burnout and moral injury “the wounds will never heal and physicians and patients alike will continue to suffer,” in “Physicians don’t just suffer burnout. They suffer moral injuries.” James Turner, MD, wrote in August 2022 that “some feel that the term burnout blames the victim,” and defined moral injury as what occurs when physicians have the ability and knowledge to help a patient but cannot because of systemic failures, in “Is burnout the wrong word?”

Torie S. Sepah, MD, a psychiatrist, dissented in June 2019, writing that “our profession is in crisis, but human rights violations and moral injury are inaccurate terms,” and asking whether a physician would walk into a boardroom to propose scribes or to propose moral injury for the agenda, in “The problem with calling physician burnout a human rights violation or a moral injury.” Maiysha Clairborne, MD, wrote in February 2018 that while most physicians would say the system is to blame, “no one considers the possibility that the physician community as a whole has some responsibility,” in “Who’s really to blame for physician burnout?”

Tomi Mitchell, MD, one of the most frequent contributors on the topic, wrote in October 2025 that burnout is usually reduced “to a workplace issue: long hours, endless charting,” and proposed instead that it is a relationship crisis, since “we live in a relationship with everything,” in “Physician burnout as a relationship crisis.” Maiysha Clairborne, MD, wrote in March 2024 that in residency, “suffering from what I now know as functional depression, I was afraid that if I shared my struggle,” she might be penalized, and named psychological safety as the overlooked factor, in “Psychological safety: an overlooked factor in clinician burnout and moral injury in health care.”

Tina F. Edwards, MD, wrote in December 2025 that “You cannot mindfulness your way out of an industry built on squeezing more and more labor out of you,” and that “calling it exploitation is just saying the quiet part out loud,” in “Physician exploitation: Why burnout is the wrong diagnosis.” Cynthia McPherson, DSc, PA-C, wrote in July 2026 that the right word is erosion, “a slow, structural wearing away of the person who showed up on day one wanting to heal people,” beginning in training, in “It isn’t physician burnout. It’s erosion.” Dr. Paul Pers wrote in July 2026 that burnout “starts to look like an exposure problem” rather than a personal failure of endurance, in “Why physician burnout is an exposure problem, not a failing.” Cassandra Craig and Toby Terwilliger, MD, wrote in July 2026, in a piece prompted by the television series The Pitt, that “we are not just tired, we are wounded by the system we work within,” in “Physician moral injury, not burnout, is the real wound.” Christine Kempton, MD, wrote in September 2026 that burnout described what happened to her but did not explain how she got there, and named “years of tiny acts of self-abandonment,” which she defines as “the repeated practice of overriding what we know, need, feel, and value” to meet an external demand, in “Physician burnout often begins with self-abandonment.”

What do physicians say about resilience training and wellness programs?

Physicians on KevinMD are broadly skeptical of resilience training and institutional wellness programs as answers to burnout. The consistent argument is that physicians are already unusually resilient, and that programs which teach coping without changing workload shift responsibility onto the person being harmed. Mentions of resilience in KevinMD burnout posts rose from 7 percent in 2009 to 2014 to 39 percent in 2024 to 2026, and the essays that mention it most often argue against it.

Nisha Mehta, MD, a radiologist, wrote in May 2018 that when asked to speak on resilience she asked instead to focus on cultural change and institutional solutions, because she was “really hesitant to link my work with physician burnout to resilience,” in “Physician burnout shouldn’t be linked to resilience.” Walter J. O’Donnell, MD, Wendy Dean, MD, and Simon G. Talbot, MD, wrote in November 2020 that mindfulness programs for clinician burnout “are proliferating like pain centers in the early 2000s,” and that resilience training borrows from other industries while ignoring that clinicians are already more resilient than most workers, in “In the burnout epidemic, is mindfulness the new opioid?”

Dympna Weil, MD, an obstetrician-gynecologist, wrote in August 2022 that of the word resiliency, physicians are “the walking, talking, breathing personification of the word,” and that she shuts down when a non-physician administrator offers tips on becoming more resilient “so I can be a more productive member of the team,” in “Less resiliency may heal burnout.” Dike Drummond, MD, who has worked with more than 175 health care organizations, wrote in June 2024 that the burnout epidemic “is an indictment of the conditions of the mine, not the resilience of the canary,” and that “Most organizations provide some form of physician resilience training” but stop there, in “Why resilience training alone won’t fix physician burnout.”

Starla Fitch, MD, wrote in July 2014 that the pain of perfection, the trait that “makes us excellent surgeons, pathologists, family practice doctors, or radiologists,” is also what fuels burnout, in “Perfection fuels physician burnout.” Maiysha Clairborne, MD, wrote in March 2018 that some burnout has causes outside work, and that the answer begins with sitting down with a spouse or children to “create a structure that is a win-win for everyone,” in “Physician burnout: When work is not the cause.”

Jessie Mahoney, MD, a pediatrician and coach, wrote in June 2025 that “over the past decade, physician wellness has been medicalized” and that the antidote “isn’t more modules, surveys, screenings, or questionnaires,” in “Medicalizing burnout misses the real problem.” Paul Dranichnikov, MD, PhD, wrote in July 2026 that “we call it resilience when, more often than not, it is simply necessity,” in “Health care burnout is a structural problem, not resilience.” Gus W. Krucke, MD, said on The Podcast by KevinMD in August 2026 that resilience blames the physician, and that the quality every doctor who finished training already has is fortitude, in “Burnout blames the doctor for a broken system [PODCAST].”

Who leaves medicine because of burnout, and why?

Physicians on KevinMD describe leaving, cutting back, and retiring early as the visible end point of burnout, and identify loss of control, rather than exhaustion alone, as the strongest predictor of who goes. Women physicians leave at higher rates and at younger ages, and several authors attribute that to caregiving loads and schedules designed for a workforce that no longer exists.

Errin Weisman, DO, wrote in December 2020 that female physicians leave medicine at higher rates “largely because how we practice medicine was created by and for men,” and that when 40 percent of women quit or go part time within six years it is not an individual problem, in “The silent pandemic: Why burnout disproportionately affects women.” Diane W. Shannon, MD, MPH, who left clinical practice herself, wrote in July 2026 that women physicians are cutting back and leaving “on a scale that is alarming,” citing research by Lisa Rotenstein and colleagues in the Journal of General Internal Medicine that women are more likely to leave across all specialties and at younger ages, in “Women physicians are leaving. Whose problem is it?”

Amber K. Brooks, MD, wrote in June 2026 that many physicians, particularly women, carry a care tax, “an additional, often invisible burden that contributes to burnout,” of eldercare and childcare that remains under-researched, citing research in Pediatrics on the time women physicians spend on both, in “Physician caregiver burnout and the care tax women carry.” Ali Novitsky, MD, wrote in August 2026 that female physicians are an inversion of the general rule that women outlive men, with a 53 percent higher suicide risk than women who are not physicians, and that Black female physicians fared worst of any physician subgroup, in “Women physicians die sooner. Hospitals still won’t act.”

Harsha Moole, MD, wrote in September 2026 that “a large meta-analysis of physician burnout found workload correlated far more strongly with exhaustion than autonomy did,” but that autonomy, not exhaustion, predicted intent to leave, in “Physician autonomy predicts who leaves, not exhaustion.” Amarish Dave, DO, wrote in August 2023 that “feeling burned out is often a function of financial fragility,” even among physicians earning in the top 1 percent, because most have no pension and an entire financial life resting on continued clinical output, in “Doctor burnout: the impact of financial fragility.” Jeff Anzalone, DDS, made the same argument in August 2026 after a ski injury showed him that “if this wrist doesn’t work, nothing else in my financial life works either,” in “Why physician burnout is really a money problem.” Susan Landers, MD, a neonatologist, wrote in October 2024 that “The opportunity to work part-time in a low-risk delivery hospital was my lifesaver,” and that early retirement is not always the answer, in “Early retirement may not be the solution to your burnout.”

When does physician burnout start?

Physicians on KevinMD trace burnout to training, and several argue it begins before medical school. The recurring claim is that duty hour limits imposed since 2003 have not lowered resident burnout, because the loss of autonomy that came with tighter supervision offset the reduction in hours. Twenty-eight of the 585 posts name residents, students, or training in the title.

Tyler Cooke, then a medical student, wrote in January 2016 that 34.1 percent of medical students experience burnout by third year, rising to between 41 and 74 percent in residency depending on specialty, and that programs teaching coping skills “are not enough to prevent burnout” without changing the environment in which trainees are taught, in “Solving burnout requires wholesale change in medical education.” Anna Goshua, then a medical student, wrote in September 2018 that the trouble begins at the undergraduate level, with premedical students describing “two or three hours of sleep a night for weeks at a time,” in “Burnout doesn’t start in medical school.”

William O. Collins, MD, wrote in December 2019 that despite duty hour restrictions dating to the 1984 Libby Zion case and the 2003 Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) rules, “rates of resident burnout have not decreased,” and that increased supervision driven by payer requirements and accreditation “has compromised their sense of autonomy,” in “A paradoxical fix to physician burnout: more patients, less supervision.” Kristin Yates, DO, an obstetrician-gynecologist, wrote in June 2019 that constant oversight during training means graduating residents “seldom get a preview of what it feels like to be at the top of the decision tree,” and that the transition to attending “amplifies the bad behaviors that we learned in residency to cope with stress,” in “Burnout prevention should be taught in residency.” Christian Tallo and Aaron Kiel wrote in November 2024 that after the January 2022 switch of Step 1 to pass/fail, “students are increasingly dedicating more time and effort to other aspects of their applications, such as research,” with about half of students at community-based schools intensifying research efforts, in “Did Step 1’s pass/fail switch actually increase medical student burnout?”

What do physicians say actually helps with burnout?

The interventions physicians on KevinMD describe as working share one feature: they change the amount or shape of the work rather than the physician’s attitude toward it. Fewer patients per day, part-time schedules, peer coaching, therapy, protected time away, and removal of documentation load recur across fifteen years of essays. Authors are careful to distinguish coaching and therapy that a physician chooses from wellness modules an institution assigns.

Jerina Gani, MD, a primary care physician, said on The Podcast by KevinMD in July 2026 that after fifteen years seeing more than 22 patients a day she shifted to part time and gave each patient more time, and that seeing more patients is the wrong answer for doctors and patients alike, in “Why the cure for physician burnout is seeing fewer patients [PODCAST].” Susan MacLellan-Tobert, MD, wrote in September 2021 of an internal peer coaching program at her institution, distinct from therapy, that it is “about the coach being a thought partner who comes alongside an individual,” in “Peer coaching as a burnout buffer.”

Susan Landers, MD, wrote in June 2024 that a Medscape survey of 9,000 physicians across 29 specialties found 49 percent burned out and 20 percent depressed, but only 11 percent seeking professional therapy, and that “Therapy helped me establish healthy boundaries and prioritize my own self-care,” in “Beyond burnout: Normalizing psychotherapy for burned-out physicians and nurses.” Angel Garcia Otano, MD, wrote in October 2023 that “Government subsidization of family physicians’ vacation time can contribute to reducing burnout,” in “Combating physician burnout: the case for subsidized vacations.” Diane W. Shannon, MD, MPH, wrote in August 2026 that physicians “agree to a schedule change to help another clinician and then resent it,” and advised choosing boundaries “given the context, your career aspirations, your home responsibilities, and your phase of life,” in “Why setting boundaries as a physician feels impossible.”

Sara Taylor, MD, wrote in December 2017 that burnout “is so insidious and under-recognized before it goes on to more serious consequences,” and that recovery takes longer than the changes that start it, in “Can doctors recover from burnout?” In March 2018 she wrote from the other side, that “knowing about the presentation of burnout isn’t the same as living with someone who is experiencing it,” in “Is your spouse experiencing physician burnout?” Tomi Mitchell, MD, wrote in June 2021 that physicians “need to create boundaries regarding schedules, patient volume, and working hours per week,” in “Surviving a thousand cuts: How to address physician burnout.” Jessie Mahoney, MD, wrote in August 2025 that “reasonable patient volumes, thoughtful schedules, responsive and compassionate leadership, and reduced clerical burden are not extravagant wishes,” and that in 20 years the only individual intervention she has seen help is a blend of mindfulness and coaching, in “Ending burnout through structure, not gimmicks.” Jillian Rigert, MD, DMD, wrote in January 2022 about leaving an oral surgery residency track and the Air Force, and the arrival fallacy of believing “I would be happier when I was in OMFS residency and the Air Force,” in “Recovering from burnout: a permission to pivot.”

Samantha Meltzer-Brody, MD, MPH, a psychiatrist who runs a program treating distressed physicians, wrote in August 2014 that the program grew more than 200 percent in its first year, “reflecting the enormous need for this type of service,” in “The epidemic of physician burnout is heartbreaking.” The dissenting note comes from Amir Atabeygi, MD, MHA, and Christina Mitchell, MHA, who wrote in August 2026 that “Before calling something a burnout intervention, ask what work it removes,” and that it should “reduce unnecessary inbox messages, simplify documentation, eliminate wasteful handoffs, shorten insurance delays,” in “Most physician burnout interventions remove no work.”

How has the physician burnout conversation changed since 2009?

The number of KevinMD posts with burnout in the title grew from single digits a year before 2014 to 46 a year in 2018 and 2019, dipped during the pandemic years, and reached 87 in the first nine months of 2026. Over the same period the vocabulary shifted from individual symptoms toward system causes, the phrase moral injury entered the conversation, and references to outside surveys fell as authors stopped needing to prove the problem existed.

Year KevinMD posts with burnout in the title
2009 5
2010 7
2011 3
2012 9
2013 9
2014 11
2015 18
2016 29
2017 41
2018 46
2019 46
2020 31
2021 22
2022 43
2023 71
2024 40
2025 67
2026 (through September 19) 87

Term frequency across the corpus, by period. Figures are the share of posts in each period that use the term at least once.

Term 2009 to 2014 (44 posts) 2018 to 2019 (92 posts) 2024 to 2026 (194 posts)
System or systemic 41 percent 58 percent 79 percent
Administrative burden, documentation, inbox 36 percent 43 percent 61 percent
Resilience 7 percent 24 percent 39 percent
Well-being 20 percent 36 percent 52 percent
Moral injury 0 percent 11 percent 15 percent
Artificial intelligence or scribes 0 percent 10 percent 26 percent
Suicide 25 percent 30 percent 12 percent
Depression 43 percent 35 percent 15 percent
Medscape, AMA, or Mayo survey data 18 percent 13 percent 8 percent

The earliest posts, five in 2009 and seven in 2010, were Kevin Pho’s short commentaries pointing at survey data: a study reported by Pauline Chen in the New York Times finding that residents accept a temporary imbalance that often proves permanent, and an Annals of Internal Medicine study finding more than a quarter of primary care physicians reporting burnout and more than 30 percent saying they would leave the field within five years. They run under 400 words, are not indexed, and are counted here but not linked. The first contributor essay in the record is Jan Henderson’s in September 2011, on burnout and suicide, cited below.

By 2012 and 2013 the contributors were physicians describing the mechanism. Dike Drummond, MD, wrote in March 2012 that “burnout has a whole team on its side” made up of stresses that sit outside clinical awareness, in “Physician burnout: Why it’s not a fair fight.” Robert Wachter, MD, wrote in March 2013 that a JAMA Internal Medicine study found “nearly half of physicians displaying symptoms of burnout,” and that “this additional work has contributed to high levels of burnout,” in “Physician burnout is an obstacle to patient safety.” Karen S. Sibert, MD, an anesthesiologist, wrote in August 2013 that an Archives of Internal Medicine study using the Maslach scale found 38 percent of physicians with high emotional exhaustion and 29 percent with high depersonalization, in “Burnout: The perfect storm of physician stress.”

In 2014 the frame became epidemic. Brian Goldman, MD, wrote in September 2014, adapting a keynote to Toronto medical graduates, that a Canadian Medical Association Journal editorial put resident burnout as high as 50 percent and that clinicians with burnout make more mistakes, in “The human cost of physician burnout is almost unfathomable.” James C. Salwitz, MD, offered a counterexample in November 2014, noting that oncologists have one of the lowest burnout rates and highest “I would do it again” responses in medicine, in “Oncologists have one of the lowest burnout rates. Why?” In 2018 Wendy Dean, MD, and Simon G. Talbot, MD, introduced moral injury to KevinMD readers, and by 2019 Torie S. Sepah, MD, was already arguing against it. During 2020 and 2021, 45 percent of burnout posts mentioned COVID or the pandemic. Tom Lawry wrote in March 2025 that “One hundred thousand registered nurses (RNs) left the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic,” and that “One in five physicians surveyed during the pandemic said they planned to leave medicine,” in “From heroes to burnout: How we failed our frontline health workers.” From 2024 onward the argument has centered on naming, on autonomy as the predictor of exit, and on whether interventions remove work.

What do physicians say about burnout and suicide?

Physicians on KevinMD have linked burnout to physician suicide since 2011, while noting that the connection is not simple and that fear of licensing consequences keeps physicians from seeking care. Mentions of suicide in burnout posts fell from roughly a quarter of posts before 2015 to 12 percent from 2024 to 2026, a shift that tracks the broader move from individual symptoms to system causes.

Jan Henderson, PhD, wrote in September 2011 that a Lancet review found the problem “seems to start in medical school,” and that physicians report self-medication and alcohol use when coping alone “for fear of losing their medical licences if they report mental stress,” in “For doctors who suffer from burnout, the ultimate tragedy is suicide.” Joshua Sonkiss, MD, a psychiatrist, wrote in May 2018 that “Health care systems should track and publicly disclose data on physician satisfaction, burnout, and suicide,” as disclosure of patient safety data had driven improvements over the previous 20 years, in “It’s time for hospitals to publicly disclose physician satisfaction, burnout, and suicide rates.” William Lynes, MD, a urologist and survivor of multiple suicide attempts related to burnout, wrote in May 2023 that “there are four stages in the evolution of suicidal behavior or ideation,” which he recognized in his own experience, in “The 4 stages of suicidal ideation: a physician’s experience with burnout and self-compassion.”

If you are a physician or other clinician in crisis, the Physician Support Line at 1-888-409-0141 is staffed by volunteer psychiatrists and is free and confidential. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text in the United States.

The KevinMD physician burnout corpus by the numbers

The figures below describe the set of KevinMD posts with burnout in the title as of September 20, 2026. They are counts of what KevinMD has published, not survey data about physicians.

Measure Value
Posts with burnout in the title 585
Date range July 7, 2009 to September 19, 2026
Named contributors 361
Posts bylined by an MD or DO 408
Podcast episodes with full transcripts 69
Posts in the corpus that are not indexed, counted but not cited 29
Total words About 575,000
Posts that open in the first person being recomputed
Most frequent contributors Diane W. Shannon, MD, MPH (17); Tomi Mitchell, MD (15); Maiysha Clairborne, MD (10); Dike Drummond, MD (8); Starla Fitch, MD (8)
Posts naming residents, students, or training in the title 28
Posts naming nurses in the title 16
Posts naming women in the title 13
Peak year before the pandemic 2018 and 2019, 46 each
Highest year on record 2026, 87 posts through September 19

How this page was built and how it is updated

The corpus was assembled by searching KevinMD post titles for the word burnout and retrieving the full text of every match, 585 posts across six pages of results. Term frequencies are computed on the full text of each post from fixed expressions stored with the corpus, so every figure on this page can be recomputed; one figure on the previous version of this page, the share of posts that open in the first person, could not be reproduced from any stored expression and is marked in the table until it is. Posts whose titles do not contain the word but which discuss burnout substantively, such as Harsha Moole, MD, on autonomy, were added by hand where cited. Posts are counted whether or not they are indexed; citations on this page are limited to posts that are indexed and can be verified at the link. Twenty-nine posts in the corpus are not indexed, Kevin Pho’s 2009 and 2010 commentaries, a few posts under 400 words, and podcast episodes without transcripts, and they are counted but not cited. One subscriber spotlight post with burnout in the title is excluded from the counts. Quotations are taken verbatim from the original posts. Author credentials are as they appeared in the byline at publication. Every source is linked in the sentence that cites it, and the full list appears at the end of the page. The complete, unfiltered feed of KevinMD posts on burnout and mental health is at the physician burnout and mental health archive. Related records: Physician suicide: what physicians say, in their own words, The electronic health record: what physicians say, in their own words, Women in medicine: what women physicians say, in their own words, Residency: what residents and attendings say, in their own words, and Direct primary care: what physicians say, in their own words.

This page is updated as new burnout essays are published on KevinMD. When it is updated, the date at the top changes, the counts in the tables are recomputed, and new named claims are added to the relevant section. Nothing is removed unless the original post is removed. An author who believes a quotation on this page misrepresents them can write to Kevin Pho and the page will be corrected.

To cite this page: Pho K. Physician burnout: what physicians say, in their own words. KevinMD.com. Updated September 20, 2026. https://kevinmd.com/physician-burnout

The 76 KevinMD posts cited on this page, in order of publication