Blog Post

New book - Why Physicians die by Suicide by Dr Michael Myers

  • by Louise Freeman
  • •
  • 28 Sept, 2017
  • •

Dr Michael Myers is a U.S. psychiatrist  who specialises in physician health.  His most recent book has just been published Why Physicians die by Suicide. 

Dr Myers has kindly provided an extract from the introduction below:

'……. as a practicing clinician treating physicians and their families and as an academician, I have spent my entire career studying the tragedy and enigma of suicide among doctors. Despite substantial research into the personal and workplace stressors, personality traits, psychological vulnerabilities, and psychiatric illnesses among doctors, the published literature is short on information gleaned from those who know physicians best – their family members, medical colleagues, and intimate friends, their teachers and students, as well as those who have lost their physicians to suicide. I have long believed that these are exactly the people who hold information that is key to our quest to make sense of why some doctors make such a desperate decision about their life.
For more than two years I have been talking with those who are willing to share their story and understanding of the physician loved one, colleague/friend, or treating doctor whom they’ve lost. In the pages that follow, you will hear their voices, and I will share what I have learned from them, as well as from another, equally significant population--physicians (including some of my own patients) who have attempted suicide and did not die. They are able to provide unique and invaluable information about the ideas and emotions that led to their decision to kill themselves as well as the ways in which their near-death experience and second chance at living have fundamentally changed them.  

Although suicide has been with us since the beginning of time, it remains a very taboo subject in our society. Many people do not want to know about it and when they do they want to push it way, to forget about it, trying hard not to remember. I am only too aware of this. I sense it when I face the resistance to my research or the derision I get from a few of my colleagues about “being obsessed with suicide”. We write about very different subjects but I feel great kinship with the late Elie Wiesel. In accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, he said, “…I have tried to keep memory alive…I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because, if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.”

As painful as suicide is, we must remember our brothers and sisters in medicine who could not go on, whose lives were so tragically interrupted. Many of the people with whom I spoke in preparation for writing this book have told me that they were sharing their stories because they didn’t want their loved one to have died in vain, and they hoped what they had to say would in some way contribute to saving the life of another despairing physician.

In the words of Dr. Edwin Shneidman who was a Professor of Psychology at UCLA, esteemed researcher, prolific author and giant in the study of suicide: “Postvention is prevention for the next generation.”

Photo Credit: Joe Vericker/Photobureau, Inc.

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