The grueling profession has long kept silent about mental distress. After losing a friend, Carrie Cunningham began telling her own story
. They are trained in an apprenticeship model that lasts a minimum of five years, but usually seven or eight. Residents begin as juniors and progress up the hierarchy, adopting the skills and behaviors of those who came before them.is shorthand for this system. It’s how surgeons develop their technical skillset, but also how they conform to the cultural norms of the profession.
The heightened sense of responsibility comes at a personal cost. Surgeons often fall into a trap of feeling like what they do “needs to be superhuman because they are the last line of defense, if you will, for a patient”, says Colin West, a professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic who specializes in physician wellbeing. When a patient does poorly after an operation – especially when there has been a mistake in their care – surgeons suffer emotional turmoil, anxiety, sadness, guilt and shame.
“I felt very angry for a very long time at the medical field,” says Barkley Roy. “My sister was so fearful about ramifications to her career and ramifications to her job and her reputation.” At night, she’d come home from work and open a bottle of wine. She looked forward to the way alcohol could prevent her from dwelling on the things that hurt. She drank to escape her anxiety and depression, but alcohol worsened both. So she drank more, and then more.
When she got home, she volunteered for a five-day professional evaluation from the Massachusetts Medical Society’s physician health services, which provides confidential assessments, referrals and monitoring of physicians. She expected to be connected with resources that would set her back on track. She was ready to throw all her willpower into recovery.
In rare and extreme cases, the physician health program will report the doctor to the state medical board to revoke their license. But these programs remain shrouded in stigma. Doctors worry that, if they seek help, they will lose their license or the trust of their communities – so much so that they often stay away from treatment.
She calls recovery the hardest thing she has ever done. “It felt like being forced through a wall of fire, terrified of walking through it and having no idea what was on the other side,” she says. But she felt that she could make a difference. And she’d be honoring Barkley, whose name had disappeared from conversations after her death, like many who die by suicide.
“I will never know what would have happened if those friends had not intervened. But I am sure I would have spiraled further with much worse consequences,” she said.
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