Do You Know A Medical Student, Resident, or Fellow Who May Have Died By Suicide?
Though data shows physicians have disproportionately high rates of suicide in the United States, no regulatory body has tracked how many of the profession’s most vulnerable members are dying by suicide. Help us investigate.
As New York hospitals were grappling with some of the deadliest days of the Covid-19 pandemic this spring, the medical community was rocked by the suicide of one of their own.
The death of Dr. Lorna Breen, who managed the emergency room at New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, generated national attention to the toll the virus is taking on the mental health of medical workers. It also spurred national efforts to address the more long-standing problem of physician suicide in the United States, where doctors die by suicide at disproportionately higher rates than the general population.
But while there is extensive research documenting physician suicide in the U.S., scholars have repeatedly warned about the paucity of data on suicide among medical students and physicians in training. Many medical students, residents, physician activists and other advocates have argued that the U.S. medical training system involves extreme pressures and labor conditions that may contribute to suicide. They warn that a failure to study these deaths will hinder efforts to prevent them—or to identify related structural problems within the American medical training system.
Over the past year, the Investigative Clinic at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY has been investigating suicide among medical students, residents and fellows in the U.S. Our work is data-driven, and we have built a confidential database of these suicides from 2010 to the present. While suicide is a complex phenomenon, we are working to study some of the factors that are most prevalent among these deaths, and to tell intimate stories that help shine a light on a reality often shrouded in secrecy.
We are asking for your help: If you know of a medical student, resident physician or fellow in the U.S. who may have died by suicide since 2010, please share your story using the form below.
The form below asks for information about suicide and unexpected death. We know these are painful and sensitive topics, and meaningful consent and privacy are important to us. Please know that we are studying information for overall patterns. In cases where a suicide has never been reported on previously, we would only write in detail about it with family consent.
If you are unsure of certain details—such as whether a death was a suicide or an accident—please tell us as much as you are able to. These are leads for our journalism, and we work to verify information through a rigorous reporting process we have honed over the last year. In verified cases, we contact loved ones, friends and colleagues for in-depth interviews and submit open records requests for supporting documents.
If you are not comfortable filling out the form below, or if you have other information to share, please send the Clinic a message via this contact form or email us at clinic@journalism.cuny.edu. You can also learn more about our work and reach out to individual reporters here.
If you know of multiple people, please submit the form a separate time for each individual. And if you know of others who might have information for us, please send them this page, or share it on social media using #DyingToHeal.
tELL uS yOUR sTORY
Have you trained to be a physician in the United States?
We want to hear from you.