Doctors and suicide

According to some estimates, one doctor dies by suicide every day in the United States,1 and around one every three weeks in the United Kingdom.2 This high rate is borne out by a linked meta-analysis by Zimmermann and colleagues (doi:10.1136/bmj-2023-078964),3 which includes 64 observational studies on male (38 studies) and female doctors (26 studies) who died by suicide. These studies, with observation periods from 1935 to 2020 and from 1960 to 2020, respectively, report a suicide rate ratio of 1.05 (95% confidence interval 0.90 to 1.22) for male doctors, indicating no overall increase in risk compared with the general population. For female doctors, however, the suicide rate ratio was significantly increased at 1.76 (1.40 to 2.21). The authors also found that while standardised suicide rate ratios for all doctors had decreased over time, the risk remained higher for female doctors compared with …