from Hacker News

Suicide reverberates among young doctors

by ViktorRay on 4/27/25, 8:04 PM with 23 comments

• by OutOfHere on 4/28/25, 12:06 AM

  https://archive.ph/LTeON

• by AStonesThrow on 4/27/25, 11:23 PM

  The despair that was palpable among a few of my physician friends was rooted in a terrible and intractable truth: that patients mostly didn't take care of themselves or care for their own health, and then approached the doctor to "fix them up".

  So the physicians are typically faced with a thankless job. It is not their job to cure or heal diseases, but to treat them. And there have been multiple times I myself have confronted a problem with my PCP, and do you know what I hoped to hear? "Rest a while" or "here's a diet I suggest" or "avoid <xyz> if you can" -- just pragmatic advice in the form of "doctor's orders" because I am the type of guy who likes to be told what to do by authority figures, you know?

  But physicians are not in that business either. And so people come into the office, obese, with developing chronic disorders that will never get any better; they are stuck in their ways and can't follow good advice anyway; they're ignorant and poor, and their main sources of food are 7-Eleven and Burger King.

  So if a person goes into medicine with the goal of "helping people" then they can really become disillusioned by the process itself. There are no miracles worked except by showing compassion, exercising patience, and sharing wisdom.

• by MyPasswordSucks on 4/27/25, 10:09 PM

  Medical school and residency is extremely stressful for extremely stupid reasons.

  Medical school is still rooted in the 1950s in a lot of ways, with an emphasis on memorization which is just patently ridiculous in an age of smartphones and search engines (not even factoring in the advent of LLMs). Residency involves working shifts that are best described as absolutely insane, in an environment that would be stressful enough as a five-hour shift, for little pay and even less prestige.

  Doctors should absolutely be able to handle stress, and I can appreciate some amount of "hell week" ritual to make sure all graduates are battle-hardened, but all reports I've seen indicate that the current state of affairs has way too much fire in the trial-by-fire, and the trial itself dwindles on way past the point of any benefit.

  It ends up producing doctors who are very, very good at doing a lot of busywork on deadline and getting yelled at, but aren't always the greatest at human intuition or thinking outside the flowchart, which is often to the detriment of patients.

• by OutOfHere on 4/28/25, 12:07 AM

  A big reason is massive educational debt. It makes it difficult to even just drop out. Medical school should be 99% free, with a 1% charge to ensure that people are not wasting their time altogether.

• by inglor_cz on 4/27/25, 9:29 PM

  Suicide was a major risk factor among young female doctors even in the aughts when I was young. The gender disparity was stark, at least in Czechia.