I'm grateful for this opportunity to discuss the tough yet important topic of medical trainee mental health with @LisaRosenbaum17 @NEJM. I encourage you all to listen, especially for Dr. Chris Veal's courageous story. I'll share main points from the discussion and survey I cited:
I'm grateful for this opportunity to discuss the tough yet important topic of medical trainee mental health with @LisaRosenbaum17 @NEJM. I encourage you all to listen, especially for Dr. Chris Veal's courageous story. I'll share main points from the discussion and survey I cited:
According to the 2023 Physicians Foundation (PF) Survey of America's Current and Future Physicians, 25% of medical students report knowing a physician/colleague/peer who has died by suicide. This number increases to 37% among physicians.
Medical students’ overall wellbeing is worse than both residents and physicians. Medical students report higher rates of burnout (71%), hopelessness (55%), and debilitating levels of perceived stress (64%) than their resident and attending physician counterparts.
Through my work with @drbreenheroes, I spoke with medical students across the country about barriers to both maintaining personal wellness and seeking mental health care during their training.
Medical students have limited curricular flexibility, but balance rigorous academic workloads, financial stressors, personal/familial responsibilities, and "extracurriculars" such as research and volunteering (which have become increasingly emphasized in the Step 1 P/F era).
There are also various barriers to seeking mental health treatment, including cultural stigma, fear of ramifications for future medical licensing/credentialing, limited access to cheap mental health care, and lack of time to attend appointments (especially during clerkships).
Despite calls to action in medical journals and by advocacy groups (@AmerMedicalAssn), there is no central, unidentified database managed by accrediting orgs for tracking and studying medical student suicides - thus, it is hard to adequately quantify and characterize the issue.
It is unclear how many medical schools use standardized tools/metrics to regularly assess student wellbeing. 72% of medical students from the PF Survey felt "using validated tools to regularly assess and respond to occupational burnout" could be helpful.
Here is a full list of workplace actions that residents and medical students rated on degree of helpfulness: (Source: PF 2023 Survey of America's Current and Future Physicians)
Recently, some have asked "How much wellness is too much wellness?" - I'd argue this is a premature and difficult question to answer without having centralized and school-based mechanisms to both track rates of suicide and regularly assess trainee wellbeing with validated tools.