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Doctors are often celebrated as heroes, but they are just as human as the rest of us. A concerning new study in the US has found female doctors face an especially high risk of suicide.

Compared to the general population, female physicians were 53 percent more likely to die by suicide between 2017 and 2021, according to researchers at the University of California San Diego, the Barnes Jewish Hospital, and Northeastern University.

Male physicians, on the other hand, were 16 percent less likely to die by suicide compared to the general population over the same years.

While suicide is not always a result of mental health issues, physician suicides included in the study were related to higher odds of depressed mood, mental health problems, and work-related stress.

Long hours, high pressures, life-or-death decisions, and onerous healthcare changes put immense stress on physicians, so it is not altogether surprising that studies have found doctors experience higher rates of life dissatisfaction, burnout, depressive symptoms, substance use, and possibly suicide.

One of the most cited studies for physician suicide rates is an international meta-analysis that found both male and female physicians experience elevated rates compared to the general population. This review, however, only included a few studies from the US, and its sample of female physicians was limited.

Some data from the US suggests suicide rates may be higher among female physicians.

This new study supports those results. It compared a total of 448 physicians (nearly 80 percent of whom were male) to more than 97,000 non-physicians in the general population (with the same ratio of males and females), spread across 30 states and Washington, DC.

In 2017, female physicians had an astonishing 88 percent higher risk of suicide than females in the general population. The most frequent form of suicide for female physicians was poisoning.

In 2020, there was a drop in the suicide rate of female physicians, but this improvement may be due to underreporting from an overburdened medical system.

During the earliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the mental health of physicians was significantly impacted. A study found 87 percent of emergency physicians reported feeling more stressed because of the pandemic, and yet 45 percent did not feel comfortable seeking treatment if needed.

That very year, an emergency physician by the name of Lorna Breen died by suicide after experiencing a breakdown due to her work on the frontlines of the pandemic.

Breen was afraid to get help because she was worried about losing her medical license, which is why her family and friends set up an organization in her honor to eliminate intrusive mental health questions from licensure and credentialing applications.

“It was not until after her death that we learned that she had one significant risk factor – she was a physician,” reads the Dr Lorn Breens Heroes’ Foundation.

“What we learned after her death is that licensing boards throughout the country require disclosure by physicians of current or past mental health care (in some cases at any level), hospitals require disclosure for credentialing, and seeking mental health care is considered a sign of weakness amongst many medical professionals.”

As many as 40 percent of doctors report reluctance in seeking formal treatment for a mental health condition because of medical licensure repercussions, according to a survey of more than 5,000 physicians in the US.

“In the health professions, if you lose your license, you could lose your house, you could lose food on the table, you could lose access to a profession that frequently defines your self-identity,” says Amanda Choflet from Northeastern, who researches substance use and suicide among nurses, physicians, and pharmacists.

More research is needed to figure out why the career of a physician seems to put females at greater risk of suicide, compared to other career options, but previous studies have found that female emergency physicians are most likely to avoid seeking mental health treatments for fear of professional repercussions.

“It’s great to know things,” says Choflet. “It’s much better to know things that can point you in a direction to mitigate harm.”

The study was published in JAMA Psychiatry.