Michael F. Myers, MD

A professor of clinical psychiatry at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, New York.

About

Michael F. Myers is a professor of clinical psychiatry at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, New York, where he previously served as vice-chair of education and director of training in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He is internationally recognized for his work on physician mental health, suicide prevention, ethics, and professional identity across the medical lifespan.

Dr. Myers is the author or co-author of 10 books, including Physicians With Lived Experience: How Their Stories Offer Clinical Guidance (APA Publishing, 2025), Becoming a Doctors' Doctor, Why Physicians Die by Suicide, The Physician as Patient, Touched by Suicide, and The Handbook of Physician Health, as well as widely cited works on medical relationships, marriage, and divorce. He has published more than 150 articles on topics including suicide, stigma, boundary crossings, ethics in medical education, sexual assault, AIDS, gender issues in training and practice, and the treatment of medical students and physicians. He discusses physician burnout and medical student mental health with Dr. Chris Veal in the Vumedi interview Physicians With Lived Experience.

Dr. Myers has received multiple awards for excellence in teaching and has served on several medical journal editorial boards, including the Bellevue Literary Review, where he has been a board member since 2021. He is a recent past president of the New York City chapter of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and lectures widely throughout North America and internationally. More information is available at michaelfmyers.com, as well as on LinkedIn and X @downstatedoctor.

Books

On The Podcast by KevinMD

Physician vulnerability and authenticity: How shared stories healMar 5, 2026

Latest articles

Physician voices

Physician addiction is a disease of silence and shame

Michael F. Myers, MD

August 26, 2026Aug 26, 2026

An excerpt from Physicians With Lived Experience: How Their Stories Offer Clinical Guidance (APA Publishing, 2025). In an interview that Dr. Grinspoon did with the New York Post in 2016, "I was a doctor – and a drug pusher," he…

An excerpt from Physicians With Lived Experience: How Their Stories Offer Clinical Guidance (APA Publishing, 2025).

In an interview that Dr. Grinspoon did with the New York Post in 2016, “I was a doctor – and a drug pusher,” he describes making a home visit as a medical student to tend to a stage 4 cancer patient. While there, he steals a dozen of the patient’s …

Physician voices

Doctors with mental illness need our care, not silence

Michael F. Myers, MD

May 12, 2026May 12, 2026

An excerpt from Physicians With Lived Experience: How Their Stories Offer Clinical Guidance (APA Publishing, 2025). What follows is a slightly edited narrative, the story of Kieran Allen, MD. Dr. Allen is from Australia, a psychiatry resident (registrar) at the…

An excerpt from Physicians With Lived Experience: How Their Stories Offer Clinical Guidance (APA Publishing, 2025).

What follows is a slightly edited narrative, the story of Kieran Allen, MD. Dr. Allen is from Australia, a psychiatry resident (registrar) at the time of writing. Dr. Allen writes from a different perspective, that of someone with a relapsing and remitting mental illness. He focuses on this for the …

Physician voices

Physician mental health and suicide prevention: stories of survival

Michael F. Myers, MD

February 26, 2026Feb 26, 2026

An excerpt from Physicians With Lived Experience: How Their Stories Offer Clinical Guidance (APA Publishing, 2025). Foreword by Jennifer Breen Feist Foreword by Jennifer Breen Feist, who lost her beloved sister, Dr. Lorna Breen, to suicide on April 26, 2020.…

An excerpt from Physicians With Lived Experience: How Their Stories Offer Clinical Guidance (APA Publishing, 2025).

Foreword by Jennifer Breen Feist

Foreword by Jennifer Breen Feist, who lost her beloved sister, Dr. Lorna Breen, to suicide on April 26, 2020. After describing the initial shock and unwanted global publicity of her death, she wrote this:

As the emails, letters, and phone calls continued to pour in, my husband …

Physician voices

Why a chief wellness officer hid her medication use for 13 years

Michael F. Myers, MD

February 14, 2026Feb 14, 2026

An excerpt from Physicians With Lived Experience: How Their Stories Offer Clinical Guidance (APA Publishing, 2025). "Here is the truth: I have been on a stable dose of Wellbutrin (Bupropion) for thirteen years, and despite being quite a public advocate…

An excerpt from Physicians With Lived Experience: How Their Stories Offer Clinical Guidance (APA Publishing, 2025).

“Here is the truth: I have been on a stable dose of Wellbutrin (Bupropion) for thirteen years, and despite being quite a public advocate about self-disclosure and mental health, I have never once said that out loud. If you have ever read anything I’ve written before …

Physician voices

Breaking the silence: mental health and racism in medical school

Michael F. Myers, MD

February 4, 2026Feb 4, 2026

An excerpt from Physicians With Lived Experience: How Their Stories Offer Clinical Guidance (APA Publishing, 2025). "I am a Black gay man from Detroit," spoke Chris Veal mid-way into a podcast when he was a fourth-year medical student at the…

An excerpt from Physicians With Lived Experience: How Their Stories Offer Clinical Guidance (APA Publishing, 2025).

“I am a Black gay man from Detroit,” spoke Chris Veal mid-way into a podcast when he was a fourth-year medical student at the University of Vermont Larner College of Medicine. He was coming out of a seven-year depression, COVID-19 had struck, he lost five family members to the disease, and on top of …

Physician voices

Training in psychiatry would give me the opportunity to understand suicide far better

Michael F. Myers, MD

January 20, 2021Jan 20, 20212

An excerpt from Becoming a Doctors' Doctor: A Memoir. After about six months of my residency in internal medicine, I began to feel something was missing, though at the time I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Then, after…

An excerpt from Becoming a Doctors’ Doctor: A Memoir.

After about six months of my residency in internal medicine, I began to feel something was missing, though at the time I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Then, after a series of general medicine rotations, I started an elective in gastroenterology. This was a game-changer. Enter Dr. Bill Kiely, psychiatrist and chief of the consultation service …

Physician voices

Why these medical interns did not die in vain

Michael F. Myers, MD

August 30, 2015Aug 30, 20154

About a year ago, I wrote a piece on my blog called “How to Welcome Incoming Residents.” It was about my struggle with getting the right messaging, messaging about the reality of stress during residency and the necessity of incorporating self-care and outreach to others. This year at orientation, in addition to adding the great suggestions posted by readers of the article, I took a different tack. It was imperative. …