Surviving medical school with depression (www.kevinmd.com) & note

Here are two excerpts from a powerful blog post on the KevindMd site which is written by an anonymous medical student.

Excerpt 1:

The downside to living with depression for almost two decades is that I have learned to succeed in spite of it by putting my health last. But in medical school, we are rewarded for this behavior. We are expected to prioritize school to succeed, spending long hours in classes, anatomy lab, or the hospital — leaving minimal time to study, let alone rest, eat or seek joy.

In my preclinical years, I was able to work therapy into my class schedule. But when rotations started, I had to stop until I found a therapist willing to meet late at night. And, even this required me to tell clerkship directors that I had a “doctor’s” appointment every week that I could not miss.

As medical students, we often sacrifice time with people and things we love for school. This forced isolation can worsen depression as well as foster anxiety, stress and burnout.

Though I have felt alone, the data show I am not. Medical students have abysmally high rates of depression and suicide, 27 percent and 11 percent, respectively. The data is not much better for residents: Almost 30 percent are depressed, and from 2000-2014, suicide was the second highest cause of death. By comparison, the CDC reports an 8.1 percent prevalence of depression in adults over 20.

So, what do you do when you reach out for help and your administration shames you into silence? Who do you talk to when your trusted advisers weaponize your mental illness as a weakness that should prevent you from becoming a doctor? Medical schools regularly create programs to address burnout like lectures, wellness days, or mandated yoga — but none of these treat or cure mental illness.

Our personal experiences with depression and mental illness allow us to uniquely connect with patients. As students, we are made to feel that our mental illness is our fault and weakens us. Medical school is difficult enough without the pressure to hide our struggles simply to appeal to an unrealistic standard of perfection. Medical schools need to choose to support students with mental illness if they want to stop losing us to depression and its consequences, including suicide. Because even with our illness, we are adults deserving of the same respect and empathy we give our patients. We are humans first.

I recommend the entire blog post which can be found here.

Cissy's note: If doctors to be, while in medical school are not treated well by the medical model they are being trained to perform in, how can we expect them to then treat patients with compassion and understanding? I think of this now not only as a trauma survivor, and a patient advocate, but as a mother to a student beginning a pre-med track in college. When I watched the Wisdom of Trauma by Gabor Mate one of the most powerful parts of the that film (and there were many) was him sharing the grueling nature of medical school and who one has to be to survive it. I'd considered the lack of training and information about trauma, emotional health, and healing before but not how many medical students are suffering and then silenced, shamed, and stigmatized if they make that suffering known or seek help. And also, it's another reminder that making systems trauma-informed, ACEs-informed, and healing-centered doesn't just benefit patients served by providers but makes the systems safer, healthier, and more responsive to providers as well.