Why doctors don’t seek mental health care →

Medical License Application Stigma

 

Top 5 reasons doctors don’t seek mental health care

1. Lack of confidentiality. May have to turn over medical records to others who control your career.

2. State medical boards demand to know. May be excluded from practicing medicine in that state.

3. Hospitals demand to know. May be excluded from hospital staff privileges.

4. Insurance plans demand to know. May be excluded from insurance contracts.

5. Forced into costly, ineffective, and punitive Physician Health Programs. May have to submit to a 12-step program and random urine drug screens—even if never used drugs.

So to prevent being punished and having one’s career derailed, doctors hide their mental health conditions. Most don’t seek the care they would suggest to their own patients. Those who do seek care often pay cash, use fake names, and drive hundreds of miles out of town to hide their treatment—then lie on mental health questions. Witnessing pain, suffering, and death in one’s medical career may lead to mental health issues. So why punish doctors?

Pamela Wible, M.D., is author of Physician Suicide Letters—Answered. Need help? Contact Dr. Wible.


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Can wellness programs stop human rights violations in medicine? →

Human Rights Violations + Wellness Programs =

Can a meditation garden in a hospital courtyard help doctors recover from 28-hour shifts? Will resilience workshops help resident physicians on 100+hour work weeks? Could yoga reverse workplace bullying? Probably not.

Seems wellness programs are popping up all over our hospitals and medical schools to help our doctors feel well. Can wellness programs stop human rights violations in medicine?

I turned this question over to Facebook:

Human rights violations + wellness programs =  ________________.

Suicide epidemic

Band-Aid on severed carotid

Lipstick on a pig

Another day as a resident

Human rights violations + wellness programs are like using air fresheners in the toilet. All you get is potpourri scented shit

Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic

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Professor tells med students to kill themselves →

This week a distraught mother calls me about her son. His professor (at a US med school) repeatedly tells medical students they are “too stupid to be doctors and should kill themselves.”

A physician friend shares that the same guy tells his internal medicine residents weekly (for 3 years!) that they are stupid and “should kill themselves.” Even bullies other instructors. Ongoing for decades. Yet nobody stops him. Why? His family owns the med school.

Yet he’s not the only psychopath on the loose. Other med school instructors tell students to die by suicide too—with step-by-step instructions.

“An anatomy professor did inform us that we would commit suicide at a higher than average rate and told us from the lectern how to accomplish it successfully,” reports one doctor-in-training. “I considered following the instructions on three occasions: once in my third year, once as an intern, and most recently when my four-year-old patient died.”

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Physician Suicide Letters—Answered (FREE Audiobook) →

PhysicianSuicideLettersAudiobook

This FREE audiobook of Physician Suicide Letters—Answered, read by the author Dr. Pamela Wible, is dedicated to all medical students, to every child who has ever dreamed of being a doctor, and to all those who have lost their lives in pursuit of healing others. PLEASE SHARE WIDELY. You may save a life. (Press download arrow below playbar for your free copy).

I lost both men I dated in medical school to suicide. In just over a year we lost three physicians in my town to suicide. I was once a suicidal doctor myself. Thankfully, I survived to tell my story—and to share a secret that has been hidden from public view for more than a century.

Nobody likes to talks about how many of our doctors are jumping from hospital rooftops, overdosing in call rooms, hanging themselves in hospital chapels. It’s medicine’s dirty secret—and it’s covered up by our hospitals, clinics, and medical schools.

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Suicide censorship? Grieving mom speaks out. →

Sean Petro Medical Student Suicide

Cheryl with son, Sean Petro, as a medical student.

Dear Dr. Wible,

As you know I lost my son Sean Petro on Mother’s Day 2016 but he wasn’t found until two days later.

From the moment Sean was found by USC/Keck police in his apartment I have been treated by his medical school like a person with no feelings. We were the last to be invited to his school’s memorial. At the end of the memorial I was told by the Associated Dean in no uncertain terms that Sean was the first medical student to die by suicide at USC/Keck. She made sure to tell me that Derek Seehausen who went missing Sean’s first year in school had just changed his mind about being a doctor. She hoped that he was now a bartender down in Cabo, Mexico. Then she went on to tell me that a doctor died suddenly a year before Sean. I guess he did die suddenly when he jumped from the school roof and landed in the quad on the pavement.

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