124 - What I Learned About Physician Suicide Rates That Every Resident Needs to Hear

Did you know that physicians are 1.8 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population — and that female physicians are at even higher risk?

If you're a resident dealing with crushing debt, long hours, and overwhelming pressure to “hold it together,” you’re not alone — but you might be suffering in silence. In this episode, Coach JPMD shares the gut-wrenching statistic that sparked this new “Did You Know?” series and opens a conversation that far too many in medicine avoid.

• Understand the real reasons behind physician suicide that most medical institutions don’t address
  
  
• Learn how financial stress, burnout, and isolation intersect and push doctors to the edge
  
  
• Walk away with three life-saving resources every young physician should know about

Listen now to gain insight, support, and critical tools to protect your well-being and that of your fellow physicians.

🛑 RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE

1. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 800-273-8255
   
   
2. Pamela Wible, MD: www.pamelawible.com — Advocacy, retreats, and support for physicians

Connect with a trusted friend or family member — especially someone outside of medicine

Discover how medical graduates, junior doctors, and young physicians can navigate residency training programs, surgical residency, and locum tenens to increase income, enjoy independent practice, decrease stress, achieve financial freedom, and retire early, while maintaining patient satisfaction and exploring physician side gigs to tackle medical school loans.

Transcript

Coach JPMD (00:01)
So welcome to another episode of the Independent Physicians Blueprint with your host, Coach JPMD. And today I'm going to introduce a new series that I'm going to be releasing every Thursday. And it's called the Did You Know series.

Many old therapies are returning back to the spotlight in medicine. Topics like sauna therapy, coronary calcium scores. ⁓

peptide therapy, neuroplasticity, Emsella therapies. There's a whole bunch of things that are coming out and they're coming up fast and furious and ⁓ things are changing at blazing speeds. Hard to keep up with some of these things with our busy schedules, patient care, regulations, technology, new medications, new treatments. And so I wanted to create this series called the Did You Know?

series where I will release a topic that I didn't know before reading about it or hearing about it and I'm going to release it every Thursday and hopefully you'll find it excite well not exciting but well yeah hopefully you'll find it exciting ⁓ and informative I guess is the word and today I'm going to start with one statistic that ⁓ is a daunting statistic

It's one of the things that actually prompted me to start this podcast. And I'm going to say and ask, did you know that physicians die by suicide 1.8 times more than the general population? And there was a recent study that came out in JAMA psychiatry that revealed that female physicians committed suicide more than the female counterparts in the general population and more so than

than the physicians, male physicians. So I think that is something that we really, really need to investigate and really ⁓ understand how we can help our physician colleagues ⁓ beat stress and not go this route. So one of the things that I believe

is prompting this or is causing this horrible statistic to occur and is that the, you know, finances, our finances are not in order as physicians. And sometimes we can ⁓ make a lot of money, but we can also spend a lot of money and not manage our finances well. So financial issues are a big, big component, I think of physicians who are dying by suicide and ⁓ as well as stress management.

We don't know how to manage our stress well and I hope that some of the things that we are going to and we continue to want to teach in this on this podcast is gonna help physicians understand how to decrease their stress and So I'm gonna end this short episode this introduction episode about the do Did you know series with three things that I think you can do as physicians were stressed and who are even contemplating this this This horrible act

And that is, you call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. 800-273-8255. If you are even thinking about it, reach out, reach out to this number. Pamela Weibel is another great resource. She's doing a lot, lots of things around physician suicide and helping physicians with...

seminars and retreats. It's a Pamela Weibel, w i b b l e.com Pamela Weibel.com. She she's a great resource and connect with a friend or family is the third thing that I recommend. If you have a good friend that you can lean on, that's preferably not in medicine, lean on them. If they are in medicine, lean on someone that you feel is strong and more experienced than you are. Lean on a family member.

And lastly, you know, if those things don't work out, you know, we can, we can receive texts on our, on your app in the, in the podcast app that you're using. So if you click on text, they, the show, and I can certainly help you with any resources that you might need. So let's, let's beat this. Let's beat this together. And hopefully you'll enjoy this new series that I'm starting, the Did You Know series, and we'll see you on Thursday with our second Did You Know.

⁓ episode coming out this Thursday.

Coach JPMD (04:51)
So just as a reminder, we're going to continue releasing our Monday episodes. That's either a solo episode or a guest episode. And we're just adding an additional episode, a did you know series episode on Thursdays. So we'll see you on Thursday and next Monday.