13 reasons why a doctor will die by suicide this week

1. She has slept for 3 hours in the last 48.

2. On his first day of residency, a vindictive doctor sent him on an errand to a nonexistent department just to watch him suffer. On many days after, the same doctor called him an idiot in the operating room.

3. He had to pronounce three people dead in a week; the gentleman with the poker tricks, the stillborn baby, the 17-year-old with alcoholic liver failure who wrote poetry. There was no counseling afterward and no place to process his grief. Later, he learns that his supervising doctor will not write him a letter of recommendation for fellowship because he was “slow”, meaning he spent too much time talking to dying patients.

4. She does not have time to call her family, pay bills, go to the grocery store, change a tampon, get an annual physical, get a haircut, or study, even though she is supposed to study every day. She feels guilty for urinating while on call because her pager is ringing.

5. The last home-cooked meal he had was three weeks ago. After the cafeteria closes, his meals consist of graham crackers and Doritos until sunup. He has gained 30 pounds from stress and bad food. Women do not even look at him anymore; his youth is slipping away while his finance and law friends send photos of their new homes and children.

6. He was called “weak” for hesitating while being pummeled with medical minutiae questions about his patient while he was exhausted and sicker than the actual patient. This is called “pimping”. Before he knew it, he was required to repeat a year of residency, ensuring he would lose a year of income-earning potential as a doctor and saving the hospital tens of thousands on a nurse practitioner.

7. She had a family emergency and called out for an on-call shift. Her chief resident told the whole hospital that she just skipped out, and ruined her reputation. The chief puts her on call for more weekends than anyone else as a yearlong punishment.

8. He went to the hospital psychiatrist for help, only to learn that the visit was placed in his “file” and his every move is being watched.

9. She miscarried while on duty in the ER and her co-resident would not come in to take over, nor would her attending see patients, letting her writhe in pain for hours as she ordered morphine for the ER patients.

10. Her psychiatry patients adore her but she knows that disclosing her anxiety will brand her as “weak” in the hospital, so she does not go to therapist appointments and drinks vodka every day after work instead.

11. His girlfriend of five years broke up with him over text for “never being around”.

12. Her attending physician in family medicine failed her on a rotation for “lack of clinical skills” after she refused his sexual advances.

13. He was a resident bullied by a racist doctor and made mistakes from stress; now he’s unemployed with $600,000 in debt and he’s “overqualified” for retail, but not qualified enough to get a job as a doctor.

400 doctors kill themselves every year. Who will be next?

Monya De, MD MPH is a physician in Los Angeles and a consultant on the documentary about physician suicide, “Do No Harm”, available on Amazon.