This morning, I woke up to a message from a friend that he had seen on social media a colleague he went to university with had, a few days ago, died by suicide. Last week, I had an email in my inbox from a young doctor in a training program informing me four of their trainee colleagues in the last 24 months have died by suicide. The week before, my …
The crisis of doctor suicide in Australia
I was sitting in the tea room out the back of the country hospital where I occasionally work as an emergency doctor, and we started to discuss the case of Dr. Hadiza Bawa Garba. Dr. Garba is a pediatric registrar from the UK who has been all over the news after being struck from the medical register for doing almost exactly what any one of us would …
The case of Dr. Hadiza Bawa Garba is a tragedy
There has been much publicity recently surrounding the issue of doctor mental health after a spat of doctor suicides, and sadly not a new thing in the history of medical training. I think the crux of this issue is the idea that doctors are somehow above the concept of humanity. We are held to standards above human abilities, yet we bleed the same blood, cry the same tears and feel …
Doctors: Don’t lose your humanity
It’s common knowledge among third year medical students that statistically a lot of us are mentally damaged in some way. Knowing these stats makes us feel better about our ongoing feelings of low self esteem, high anxiety and sometimes outright panic. In the car on the way to rotations, regular starters of conversation are statements like, “Did you know 35% of med students are depressed at any given time?”, to …
When do medical students lose their empathy?
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