When Healers Need Healing: Doctors' Health, Need of the Hour

-


“The ‘equilibrium’ that people see in me is really an illusion. I am as flawed as anyone. It’s only that I seem to have the knack of hiding.”

-Erich Segal, Doctors

 

Health is wealth. Well, we seem to have almost forgotten it. This is especially true for most doctors. Being in the field of medicine for almost two decades now, I have seen doctors struggling with physical and mental health issues far more than we tend to assume. The general opinion is because doctors know about the human body and various conditions that inflict upon it, they must be pretty good at dealing with its vagaries. However, the truth is doctors are after all human beings and they are vulnerable, just like anyone else.

God or Not?

Society still treats the medical profession and doctors in highest esteem and more often than not, we doctors start believing it (so called messiah complex or saviour complex or white knight complex) where we go out of the way to help someone or save someone. We may feel responsible for others. There is nothing wrong in helping till it starts affecting our health. When we keep subjugating our health needs, postponing our health issues for something else, we will reach a breakdown point, from which we may never recover, physically or mentally.


When it hits Home

A friend of mine who is also a doctor was recently diagnosed with a debilitating knee condition at a very young age. She felt extreme pain and difficulty in walking, was constantly anxious and jittery and at one point, felt extremely hopeless. She knows everything about the disease and yet it took a toll on her mental health. More than the pain, she was worried about its outcome and its impact on her future. But despite going through so much, she kept working till her the pain made it impossible for her to carry on and she finally decided to take her call and started focusing on her health. She is gradually recuperating and improving but has decided firmly to put her health needs above everything else. This is the story with most doctors.


What's Stopping Us?

As strange it may sound, doctors are reluctant in seeking help, especially when it comes to mental health. There goes a saying that doctors are the worst patients. Stigma plays a major obstacle in doctors seeking help for mental health issues. Many are worried if they talk about their stress, anxiety or depression or substance use, it may affect their professional lives. They prefer to keep shut and ignore the red flag signs rather than speaking out. Many doctors self-diagnose and self-treat, rather than seeking professional help and even if they do so, it's usually from friends or family. As doctors usually have personality traits of perfectionism, they tend to be overly self-critical and controlling, which means they have a hard time accepting that something can be wrong with them, especially their mental health and hence they delay or don't seek treatment at all.

Many have extremely tight schedule and lots of professional commitments which leave them with very little time to take care of themselves.This is very evident in junior residents or postgraduate trainees who have back to back shifts and very little time to even eat or sleep or take bathroom breaks. As a result, a huge proportion of residents suffer from stress and burnout. The condition has been worsened by the pandemic. In some studies, depression was reported to be as high as 50 percent among PG trainees, with almost 80 percent reporting stress.


To make matters worse, doctors have maladaptive coping skills (because we are never taught how to deal with failures and frustrations, either in schools or by parents or society because who wants to talk about failures when everyone is looking at being successful). This may surprise many but doctors often use alcohol, smoking cigarettes, and even using sleeping pills, more often than not, than to talk about mental health issues openly.

To add to the numbers, doctors have a relatively shorter life expectancy (average -59 years) compared to average person in India (67.5 years). A 10-year long study by the Indian Medical Association (IMA) found that stress, followed by lack of periodic check up were the predominant factors. It's also worth noting that suicide is also increasing steadily amongst doctors.

Health is the only Wealth

 It's high time we doctors start taking our health seriously. It starts with accepting that we are human too and our bodies and minds are not infallible. We can be vulnerable and it's not a sign of weakness but simply a call to pay attention to ourselves. We must start listening to our bodies when they need care. We do not have to wait for another degree or a better job or a heart attack to remind us to look after ourselves. It's time to put into practice the advice we give so frequently to our patients - eat healthy food, sleep well, exercise regularly, reduce stress, reduce smoking and alcohol intake, talk to family and friends and smile often. It can start right here, right now.



Dr. Suhasini Das

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

May I have your ATTENTION, please?

-
Image
A Piece of our Attention In today’s world, we are constantly bombarded with information throughout our waking hours, by our television sets, computers or the ubiquitous mobile phone. The internet made information transmission easy, rapid and with the ability to penetrate the remotest corner of the world. I am sure many of you will agree with me that although we have to navigate sheer volume of data every day, only a handful of them are actually essential, most are unnecessary and some are purely fraudulent. However whatever may be their purpose, one thing is common - they are all craving for our attention . In our personal lives, we have our families, children, parents, friends, work, health, community, environment and many different domains and each seeks a share of our attention. If we focus just on a particular area for long and neglect others, the consequences are inevitable. Our health may suffer, our relationships may lack warmth and affection, we may become distant and discon...
Read more

Every Life Matters: Changing the Narrative on Suicide

-
Image
Introduction Every year more than 7,00,000 individuals commit suicide, that translates to 1 person dying every 40 seconds.   To create awareness around this serious issue, World Suicide Prevention Day is observed on 10 September across the globe. Every suicide impacts not just a single person but the whole family and community at large. It raises a lot of questions, many remain unanswered. The family members often find themselves at loss, sometimes blaming themselves, but mostly clueless about where they missed the red flags. Suicide is not an isolated incident but a culmination of multiple factors - emotional, psychological, personal, social, and economical- which eventually leads an individual choose death over life. For every suicidal death, there are many who will attempt, putting a large number of people at risk. What does Statistics say? As per the National Crime Records Bureau, 1,64,033 suicides were reported in 2021 , which is an increase of 7.2% as compared to 2020. T...
Read more

Mindful Living: The Way Forward!

-
Image
    The last few decades have seen an explosion of mindfulness related literature. There is mindfulness meditation, mindful breathing, mindful eating and so on. Anyone trying to search on how to manage stress on the internet is likely to come across the term mindfulness, for sure. Yet, a lot of this information available on internet does not clarify the basic tenets of mindfulness. Origin of Mindfulness The essence of mindfulness derives from  Buddhist and ancient Hindu philosophies  like Vipassana which had been practiced by monks and ascetics for thousands of years. The term is loosely derived from the Pali word  ‘sati’   or Sanskrit word   ‘smrti’   which means ‘remembrance or reminiscence or calling upon mind’. The most popular of all mindfulness exercises, mindful breathing is de rived from Anapanasati, is the quintessential form of Buddhist meditation and has been mentioned in different sutras. Anapana means inhalation and exhalation, sati m...
Read more