How an early loss shaped a career
DOCTOR NEVER FORGOT STUDENT SUICIDE
Dr. Michael Myers was a first-year medical student at Western University in London, Ontario, in the early 1960s when his roommate killed himself. His body was found in his parked car on a deserted stretch of a Lake Huron beach. The experience influenced Myers’ own career as a doctor. Myers recently published Why Physicians Die By Suicide: Lessons Learned from their Families and Others Who Cared. The following is an edited transcript of an interview with the National Post.
Q Why did you make this your life’s work?
A The loss of my roommate to suicide when I was a first-year medical student, I think, was really pivotal. I buried that; I didn’t really pay attention to it. There was such a stigma associated with suicide.
I was the last one, I think, to see him alive from our class. We were both saying goodbye for the weekend. It was superficial talk, ‘see you after the weekend.’ And when I went back he had killed himself. I tried to talk to my roommates about it, but I guess they were awkward about it, and we heard nothing from the dean’s office or the medical school. It was as if he never existed.
It wasn’t until I finished medical school, when I was interning in Los Angeles, I began to see and look after more and more people who had made very serious suicide attempts. I worked in Detroit for a year as an emergency doc, and I saw the maiming that occurs with suicide attempts — by gunshot injury or jumping from heights or severe overdoses that really damage the body. I went back to Los Angeles to do internal medicine and saw more of that. That really kind of directed me into psychiatry. During my psychiatry residency, I just happened to look after physicians and their family members. I began to get more and more doctor referrals.
Q When your roommate died, you said no one really talked about it, that it just “sat there.” How has that culture changed?
A It’s changed tremendously. When the cause of death is known to be suicide, there’s always a response now. If it’s a medical student, it emanates from the dean’s office. They have grief counsellors or so-called critical incident debriefing. They meet with the medical school class. You walk a fine line between acknowledging the person died by their own hands and and not sensationalizing it.
( When there is a physician suicide in smaller communities) that’s when there are a lot of very raw and very painful emotions in doctors. Because not only are they grieving the loss of a colleague or friend, but there’s a great deal of blame and self-responsibility as well. They feel often they missed clues or didn’t reach out enough. Or sometimes they worry about who might be next. Because if it’s a stressed community with a shortage of doctors, so many of them will say, ‘of all of us, he seemed really to be coping the best.’
I mention in the book that some people feel that there’s an ethical problem — that we physicians shouldn’t be allowed to kill ourselves. That we just have to suck it up if we get depressed and suicidal. That we’ve got a responsibility to our patients.
Q Why was it important to interview family members — the spouses and children of doctors who died by suicide?
A I’ve felt for so long their voices really needed to be heard. These people have on-the-ground observations. You’re entering the world of grieving people, and yet they want to talk, because there’s a lot they want to say.
The one thing I uncovered most was stigma. Either that (the doctors) really, really delayed going for help so they were very sick when they first knocked on someone’s door, or they didn’t go for help at all. That was what I found most disturbing.
Many managed to go into work even when they were quite symptomatic — that’s the other thing I heard from families: ‘I don’t know how my wife did it. She was not functioning at home at all for the last six months of her life. But she kept going into work; she kept delivering babies. And one day, she just didn’t come home.’ ”