A manuscript regarding suicidal death of physicians resulting from psychological stress inner world (No. 355)
Abstract
Gerald C. Hsu
The author is a 73-year-old medical research scientist who recently read an article regarding physician health and death (Reference 1). Inspired by the story and his own past experiences, he decided to write a special manuscript to be shared with medical doctors. This article has a different writing style compared to his previous 354 math-physical medicine research papers, based on a quantitative method to derive analysis results with high precision, aimed at helping patients. The goal of helping patients must go through the delivery channel of physicians and surgeons, while being concerned about the psychological health of medical doctors. This is the reason why he wrote this article with a qualitative style with an aim at medical physicians. Being a physician is an enviable profession, where they greatly invested and sacrificed to reach to where they are today. In terms of financial rewards, that is money, even though they are not generously rewarded, at least they are handsomely compensated. With their added knowledge advancement, skill improvement, and society contribution, they may even earn their deserved fame. Their ultimate goal should come from saving people’s life, not the same as people with political power or financial power. In the author’s opinion, saving lives is the outmost power to achieve; therefore, it is a desirable profession indeed. By having pride and feeling prestige at commencement by getting their MD degree, the physicians should not allow their accomplishments between the ages from 20 to 30 years of age become the only internal strength and emotional support. They should continuously improve themselves to expand into different areas in exploring new findings, learning additional skills and knowledge. This life-long learning will make a broader and more capable person, even for a physician. These newly gained inner strengths will aid physicians to face new challenges in their post-graduate school life. However, there is a price to pay from having a decent, enviable, and well-compensated profession. In terms of reducing and controlling stress, burdens, and psychological pressure that comes along with their job, life, and relationships, the author believes that they must go deeper into their own inner world, i.e. their mind and heart, to search for strength. When different types of stress overwhelms them, they must return to their original motivation when they decided to become a physician which is helping their patients. Only this type of compassion in their heart, similar to having faith in a religion, can then help them survive many types of tests and challenges they encountered in their profession and private life. For those medical doctors who chose medicine for other reasons, with material or superficial motivations, they should search their heart again to see whether another career is better for them. For example, if their initial motivation was monetary, they better shift their career early enough to be an entrepreneur who takes big risks for larger financial returns. When physicians face various stressful situations, they should not fight this battle alone. There are plenty of people who would support them as long as they speak up and seek assistance, such as from a mental health professional, like the author did. The author is an educated individual, knowledgeable scientist, and experienced engineer, but more importantly, he had many rich life experiences that were long, colorful, striving, and challenging. Through his brief self-introduction, the reader can see many similarities and also identify some connections. He cares about his medical colleagues as much as he cares about patients with chronic diseases. This is his motivation of writing this manuscript aiming at physicians, even though he knows that it is a unique article with a qualitative style instead of his previously published quantitative research papers. If anyone has interest on this subject and would like to provide feedback, please contact the author at g.hsu@ eclairemd.com. You will remain anonymous and any information provided will be confidential.