Almost two years ago I went to the funeral of a medical school classmate. A little more than three weeks before he had jumped from a parking garage after finishing his clinic. He had a loving wife and three young children. He had the respect of his colleagues and the love of his patients. There was nothing out of the ordinary in his financial or personal life. It didn’t make sense, but it rarely does. Something broke inside the mind of someone I have always known to be a happy, easygoing person.
I don’t know why he committed suicide. It seemed to be related to a recent period of intense, severe depression. I don’t know if the pressures of being a physician were a factor, but I do know that physicians have one of the highest, if not the highest suicide rate of any profession; nearly twice the rate of suicide compared to the general population. It may actually be higher. There is tremendous social and institutional pressure to label a death an accident instead of a suicide when ambiguous. If any cohort of people could make suicide look like an accident or death from natural causes, it would be someone in the medical profession.
Of my medical school class of about one hundred, two have been lost to suicide before my 41st birthday. The first was before we even finished medical school. Why do we lose so many physicians to suicide and how many more will be lost?
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