Can You Be A Doctor If You Have Anxiety

So don’t jump to the conclusion that your anxiety would be any less outside of medicine. Or that it’s the cause.

i want to be a doctor but i have anxiety: 4 Ways to Beat the Fear

I know it gets the better of me at times. It was only last week, returning back to studies as a 4th year student, that the pit in my stomach returned once again. Overly anticipating the year in front of me, and all the work involved, it’s hard not to get anything but anxious.

But there are coping strategies that can help you overcome it.

See a Clinician

I’ve written about overcoming overwhelm in medical school before. As a symptom of anxiety however, it doesn’t always require as serious treatment as a single emotion. Anxiety, on the other hand, is generally considered a collection of emotions. Making for an overall intense experience.

This is why the first step in dealing with it, just as in medicine as it is in life, is to seek clinical help. Especially as it can oftentimes be debilitating in nature if left unresolved or untreated. Sometimes being the root cause of failing in med school itself.

So seek out a psychiatrist if possible. Or speak to someone available in a mental health support team. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking, just because you know some medicine, you’re able to diagnose or treat yourself. That’s not how it works.

If you’re studying medicine abroad and feel isolated, seek out an online consultation with someone back home. Just don’t keep your feelings to yourself.

Just do this first. Medicating your condition might mean be the only way of making it through.

Be Honest

Working in healthcare isn’t for the faint-hearted. You need a certain amount of emotional strength and intelligence to deal with the responsibilities of becoming a doctor. And this gets only more demanding with time; when you become even more specialised or take on even further responsibility.

If you feel your problems with anxiety are unmanageable even with the support of medical help, you have to be honest with yourself. A career as a doctor might not be the best fit for you if you can’t see things improving.

Whether that should deter you from continuing studies or not isn’t for me to say. There is lots you can do outside of medicine with a medical degree of course, but perhaps a hospital or clinical environment aren’t the best places for you to be.

Work out what it is that’s causing your anxiety. Make a list. Decide how or if each of these issues can be addressed.

Use this knowledge to make an informed decision about your future. Don’t be rash.

Remember also that sometimes, as the psychologists and psychiatrists chronicled in this article suggest, it might not be medicine or a medical environment at all that’s causing the issue.

So don’t jump to the conclusion that your anxiety would be any less outside of medicine. Or that it’s the cause.

It really needs to be investigated.

Aim for Balance not Grades

There’s a difference between stress and anxiety but both can overwhelm. The former is more short-term. The latter can linger. Either way, a lack of balance in your life as a med student isn’t going to help.

Sometimes you need stress in your life to meet certain goals. Without it, most of us maybe wouldn’t discipline ourselves to get the work done that stands to benefit us in the first place.

Too much of it though? Tips the balance the other way. Piling up to aggravate or trigger anxiety. Thus compounding the problems pertaining to each.

This is why I say it should be every med students priority to work smart rather than hard. Because all the time you spend not working, helps sustain you in the long run. Preventing you from burn out and better placing you for the marathon that is medical education.

So do what you can to strike a balance.

Examine Your Thought Patterns

The best way to counter anxiety in med school is to work out the triggers for it in the first place. This involves being organised with your approach. Detailing your day and listing out all the events that typically happen throughout.

Doing this will help you gain greater insight into the cause of your problems and better understand how you can go about addressing them.

Having done this myself as a returning student, I’ve figured out exactly what sets me in to a spin. It’s always the first week back at med school that troubles me, especially adjusting to a new schedule or meeting new professors or hospital wards for the first time.

To counter this I tell myself to take the first week easy. To not get so intense about things, my own study schedule, habits etc, being absolutely perfect. Making time instead to catch up with friends, relax doing non-medical related things and slowly acclimatise back to things after a summer away.

It’s important you incorporate positive aspects of self-talk into your day. Remind yourself that feeling anxious is fine, something you’ve dealt with plenty of times before and consistently come through.

Also remember just how common it is. It’s felt by all of us at one point or another. Whether we openly admit it or not.

Summary

Anxiety is common among med students and nobody is alone in experiencing it. That said, it can be managed and only in exceptional cases may be cause for you to quit.

More often that not, there are things you can do to mitigate it.

Hopefully this article can serve as encouragement for you take the correct action first.

Doctors fear mental health disclosure could jeopardize their licenses

M edicine is grappling with rising levels of physician burnout, one of the factors driving high rates of depression and suicide in the profession. But physicians who suffer from mood disorders are often reluctant to seek treatment — in part because it might jeopardize their license to practice. For instance, in one survey, around 1 in 15 surgeons said they’d recently had suicidal thoughts, but more than 60 percent were reluctant to seek help because of concerns that it might affect their license.

Now, a new study shows, those concerns break down along geographic lines — and in those states whose licensure applications ask the most sweeping questions about mental illness, physicians are most likely to be reluctant to seek treatment.

The problem lies in how they ask, said Mayo Clinic professor and internist Dr. Liselotte Dyrbye, who led the study.

“In some states, the question is really broad, as in, ‘Have you ever been treated for a mental health condition?’” she said. “It’s simply not a fair question.”

Instead, Dyrbye said, licensing “should be based on your ability to perform your job today. Rather than asking, ‘Are you currently diagnosed with a mental health condition?’ they can ask if you are currently suffering from any condition, mental or physical, that keeps you from doing your job. Asking about that is a reasonable question.”

But, her team’s research found, two-thirds of U.S. states ask the broader form of the question — despite the fact that groups including the American Medical American, American Psychiatric Association, and the Federation of State Medical Boards recommend against it — and that could be causing physicians to forego treatment.

‘I just crashed’

In 1994, Dr. Steven Miles was a well-respected gerontologist and professor of biomedical ethics at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

“I was at the peak of my career, getting awards and all that jazz, when I just crashed,” he said. He sought help from a psychiatrist, who diagnosed him with bipolar II disorder.

Miles continued his clinical work while receiving treatment. He also spoke openly about it while teaching at the University of Minnesota, particularly one time after the suicide of a medical student.

“I said to the class, ‘Look, illness happens, and I’m proof that a physician can have a mental illness and function really well,’” he recalled.

Several months later he was filling out the annual renewal form for his state medical license. Among other things, the questionnaire asked if he had ever been diagnosed with one of several psychiatric conditions, including bipolar disorder. “I didn’t think much of it when I said yes,” Miles said.

He had no reason to. There hadn’t been any patient complaints, and his name appeared regularly on lists of the state’s “Top 100 doctors.”

But the Minnesota Board of Medical Practice began an investigation, demanding a letter from his psychiatrist and full access to the records of his psychotherapy sessions.

Miles refused, arguing that the board’s request was overly invasive and served to deter physicians from seeking help for mental health disorders. After a four-year standoff and threats of legal action, the board backed off. Miles still sees patients and teaches, and his bipolar disorder is well-controlled with medications and therapy. Minnesota remains, however, one of 24 states without the recommended wording in either its initial or renewal licensing forms.

Hands are tied

Revoking licensure or otherwise preventing a physician from working due to mental disorders is actually illegal under the Americans with Disabilties Act. Covered conditions include mental illnesses such as depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. The law defines as a form of discrimination “employment tests or other selection criteria that screen out or tend to screen out an individual with a disability or a class of individuals with disabilities.”

Yet medical licensing boards get away with it.

“Boards’ hands are often tied in terms of what state legislatures will let them do,” Dyrbye said, adding that states are caught between protecting the public from impaired doctors and a physician’s right to make a living.

“The ironic thing is that the unfair question defeats the boards’ purpose,” she pointed out. “If a doctor is impaired but is discouraged from seeking help, the patients are not being protected. We want doctors to get help before they are unable to do their jobs.”

Dr. Beth Baxter, a Nashville psychiatrist who has bipolar disorder, has been open about her illness for years. But, she says, that’s never hindered her license renewal in Tennessee — despite that state being one of three (Iowa and Wyoming are the other two) whose renewal forms do not contain recommended wording.

“It helps to be open about it” with colleagues, Baxter said. “So it’s not a surprise when there is a time when you can’t work.”

Dyrbye is hoping to make that kind of openness the norm — starting with paperwork that asks about mental health in a better way. She presented her study’s findings to the Federation of State Medical Boards earlier this year. Her next step, she said, is getting the word out to state legislatures that there are numbers to back up recommendations against broad questioning about doctors’ mental health.

“Medical license boards are often controlled by the state legislature, so they are the ones that need to step up and get these questions fixed,” she said.