Philadelphia Medicine Summer 2020 - 7

p h i l a m e d s o c .o rg

Wounded HealerS
The Struggle over
Physician Burnout
and Suicide
By: Alan Miceli, Editor

A

ccording to her sister, Dr. Lorna Breen's suicide in April
was caused in large part by the relentless strain of modern
medicine. Dr. Breen was medical director of the emergency
department at New York Presbyterian Allen Hospital in a low-income
community hard hit by the coronavirus. She contracted the virus,
recuperated for 10 days, then returned to work, to continue treating
the flood of coronavirus patients in Manhattan.

it after three doctors in her
community killed themselves in just 18 months.
She wanted answers and
she wanted to find a way
to help.

Dr. Breen's sister, Jennifer Feist, told The New York Times, the
crushing emotional weight that the medical profession produces
today, by rewarding perfection and showing disdain for weakness,
had much to do with her sister's death. "If the culture had been
different, that thought would have never even occurred to her."

Hotline
Conversations

Feist said the stigma of asking for help was another burden.
"Lorna kept saying, 'I think everybody knows I'm struggling.' She
was so embarrassed."
The extraordinary pressures placed on health care providers during
the coronavirus is putting an exclamation mark on a problem that
has been plaguing the medical community for decades. About 300 to
400 doctors in the U.S. kill themselves each year, more than double
the rate of the general population.
Dr. Pamela Wible is a family practice physician in Oregon who
has been running a physician-suicide hotline since 2012. She started

Several thousand hotline conversations later, Dr. Wible has
concluded that the system for training medical school students
and residents and the medical profession, itself, are badly broken.
She says the system is crippled by bullying, sleep deprivation, and
bureaucratic burdens that intrude on the doctor-patient relationship.
Dr. Wible says medical training is rampant with deplorable
conditions - such as residents working nonstop for 24 hours or
more, with 80-hour work weeks - conditions that would never be
tolerated in virtually any other business or profession.
Physicians have told Dr. Wible about hallucinations, life-threatening seizures and depression. Fatigued doctors have felt responsible
continued on next page

RIGHT: Picture Courtesy: Columbia University School of Medicine.
Summer 2020 : Philadelphia Medicine

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Philadelphia Medicine Summer 2020

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