The healthcare workforce plays a critical role in saving lives by providing essential suicide screening and treatment. Ironically, healthcare workers themselves face significant mental health challenges and suicide risks as the frontline to tragedy. This is due in part to their own collective nature which compels them to just “suck it up” and hide their suffering, and in part due to a culture that tacitly condones this code of silence, often penalizing them for breaking it.
Addressing the spiking levels of mental health challenges in the healthcare workforce therefore requires not focusing on individual strategies like meditation, or superficial gestures like “breakroom brownies”. What is truly needed is a systemic change in how we support healthcare professionals.
There are systems issues driving distress and despair and creating barriers to wellbeing and help-seeking. Putting all the emphasis on so-called "troubled people" deflects the organization's/industry's responsibility to change these root causes.
In this ongoing blog series, we will examine the poor state of mental health among healthcare workers, the reasons it exists, and an evidence-based solution that can help change toxic healthcare cultures.
Our first installation is a case study of how a combined lack of crisis preparation by a hospital administration, a “suck it up” culture, and a relentless exposure to trauma provoked a mental health crisis for an emergency physician that, because of her fear of being stigmatized, ended in tragedy.
Then we will look at systemic root causes of poor mental health in the overall healthcare workforce, and what barriers exist to these workers’ mental health and wellbeing.
We’ll continue with a look at how to offer hope to this cohort, literally! We will examine how by implementing the H.O.P.E. Certification program within the Zero Suicide Framework can foster a culture of caring, destigmatize mental health issues, and prevent suicide among physicians, nurses, and other frontline medical staff.
Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas
