Physicians Aren’t Immune to Suicide and Depression

Medicine is a tough profession. It’s both tremendously rewarding and terribly demanding. Physicians are at the front lines of humanity, along with nurses, therapists and more. But being at the front lines can be risky: In a study, nearly 50 percent of doctors reporting that they were burned out.     1     physicians, who are on call 24/7, have it the worst, followed closely by physicians working in other demanding subspecialties.

Studies about physician burnout are important but they typically don’t reflect this group’s high risk for even more dire mental health outcomes. Past research has also shown that physicians have a higher risk for suicide compared with other professions,     2     in the top ten of risky professions. And a recent Lancet study notes that     3    , one physician dies from suicide every day in the U.S.

Suicidal tendencies     4     the whole community. Health care systems respond with wellness meetings and other interventions but trainees still report feeling uncared for. In fact, several trainees privately tell me that they have to report fewer hours than they actually work.

Research studies     5     similar concerns to those I’ve heard. They report that workplace factors contribute to physician suicide “including a large workload, competitiveness of training programs, pressure of patient and service demands and the risk of     6     injury if physicians are forced to work in ways that conflict with their ethics and values.”

This new analysis is a major     7     for understanding and appropriately responding to the mental health crisis today. Instead of     8     on the past, the alarm has now been sounded: Greater attention must be paid to physician well-being. We want physicians to be safe and well, but we also need to help patients by     9     good health practices. Fortunately, preventive measures are already underway. Soon, we will hopefully be able to better     10     part of what is missing in the current conversation about physician mental health.

Today, the events     1     in realistic-looking or-sounding video and audio recordings need never have happened. They can instead be     2     automatically, by powerful computers and machine-learning software. The catch-all term for these computational productions is “deepfakes”.

The term first appeared on Reddit, a messaging board, as the username for an account which was producing     3     videos. An entire community     4     up around the creation of these videos, writing software tools that let anyone automatically     5     one person’s face onto the body of another. Reddit shut the community down, but the technology was out there. Soon it was being applied to political     6     and actors.

Tools for editing media     7     have existed for decades—think Photoshop. The power and peril of deepfakes is that they make fakery cheaper than ever before. Before deepfakes, a powerful computer and a good chunk of a university degree were needed to produce a realistic fake video of someone. Now some photos and an Internet connection are all that is required.

The consequences of cheap, widespread fakery are likely to be     8    , albeit slow to unfold. Plenty worry about the possible impact that believable, fake footage of politicians might have on civil society—from a further loss of trust in media to the     9     for electoral distortions. These technologies could also be deployed against softer targets: it might be used, for instance, to bully classmates by creating imagery of them in embarrassing situations. In a world that was already saturated with     10     imagery, deepfakes make it plausible to push that even further.