MedPage Today
Originally published November 14, 2012
Suicide among physicians appears to follow a different profile than in the general population, with a greater role played by job stress and mental health problems, a national analysis showed.
Problems with work were three times more likely to have contributed to a physician's suicide than a nonphysician's, Katherine J. Gold, MD, MSW, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and colleagues found.
Their analysis of the National Violent Death Reporting System also showed that known mental illness prior to suicide was 34% more common among physicians than nonphysicians.
"The results of this study paint a picture of the typical physician suicide victim that is substantially different from that of the nonphysician suicide victim in several important ways," the group wrote online in General Hospital Psychiatry.
The entire story is here.
The original article is here.
Here is the conclusion from the abstract:
Mental illness is an important comorbidity for physicians who complete a suicide but postmortem toxicology data shows low rates of medication treatment. Inadequate treatment and increased problems related to job stress may be potentially modifiable risk factors to reduce suicidal death among physicians.
