Suicide reverberates among young doctors
wsj.com
wsj.com
So the physicians are typically faced with a thankless job. It is not their job to cure or heal diseases, but to treat them. And there have been multiple times I myself have confronted a problem with my PCP, and do you know what I hoped to hear? "Rest a while" or "here's a diet I suggest" or "avoid <xyz> if you can" -- just pragmatic advice in the form of "doctor's orders" because I am the type of guy who likes to be told what to do by authority figures, you know?
But physicians are not in that business either. And so people come into the office, obese, with developing chronic disorders that will never get any better; they are stuck in their ways and can't follow good advice anyway; they're ignorant and poor, and their main sources of food are 7-Eleven and Burger King.
So if a person goes into medicine with the goal of "helping people" then they can really become disillusioned by the process itself. There are no miracles worked except by showing compassion, exercising patience, and sharing wisdom.
The American health care system has failed people. Capitalism wants people to consume unhealthy things to unhealthy degrees. Your job (your boss and the shareholders) are killing you.
I am pretty fit and have been for a majority of my life, but from my mid-20's to 40 I wasn't any where near as fit. Why? Because of professional obligations, mandatory uncompensated overtime, ridiculous deadlines and budgets due to the capital classes short-term desires to live bloated lifestyles because they are deeply unhappy.
I recently moved back to the U.S. The obesity is incredible. And part of me does think people should take some responsibility for what they eat and how little they move, but I also have compassion because when I had a 50+ hour work week and spent 15 hours a week commuting I had just enough time to sleep and watch a movie before heading back to work. That led to unhealthy food and exercise habits and probably too much alcohol.
What helped me? Quitting full-time employment (indentured servitude). I have been self-employed for 11 years, I dropped (and kept off) 20 pounds within a year of not working for others. I rarely drink.
But not everyone is willing to take that sort of risk. And most people have lifestyle bloat (subscriptions, expensive cars, expensive clothes, houses full of cheap Chinese electronics, new iPhones every 2years, unhealthy, expensive food delivered to their doors daily, etc.).
There are billions being spent every day to incentivize people to consume shit. Most individuals don't have a chance at combating this messaging, as critical thinking is in short supply (looking at you people who voted for and support this clown car of an administration in power in the US right now).
Point is, you're not wrong, but let's not just blame "poor people who eat at 7-11". This entire country (world) is sick.
Medical school is still rooted in the 1950s in a lot of ways, with an emphasis on memorization which is just patently ridiculous in an age of smartphones and search engines (not even factoring in the advent of LLMs). Residency involves working shifts that are best described as absolutely insane, in an environment that would be stressful enough as a five-hour shift, for little pay and even less prestige.
Doctors should absolutely be able to handle stress, and I can appreciate some amount of "hell week" ritual to make sure all graduates are battle-hardened, but all reports I've seen indicate that the current state of affairs has way too much fire in the trial-by-fire, and the trial itself dwindles on way past the point of any benefit.
It ends up producing doctors who are very, very good at doing a lot of busywork on deadline and getting yelled at, but aren't always the greatest at human intuition or thinking outside the flowchart, which is often to the detriment of patients.
If you are in the US, in the past 25yr:
* 9/11
* 25y of constant combat deployments around the world
* 2008 recession
* 2026-ish recession
* Loss of company pensions and stability
* Massive housing crisis in availability of type of homes needed, and costs - builders are only incentivized to build upper middle class+ housing in many areas
* Gig work where people are working 3 jobs with no benefits or retirement becoming more popular
* College financial cost unsustainable
* Massive increase in school and public shootings
* Covid
Any ideas of stability in US society that may have come from their parents simply do not exist anymore. The path of a middle class life for most people in the US is gone.
A gazillion more things I'm not thinking of.
I'm getting close to 50, and any time somebody talks about how "x,y,z generation is weak", not even 99% of the time, but 100% of the time, I know the person saying that is simply incompetent.
"Any ideas of stability in US society that may have come from their parents simply do not exist anymore."
I alluded to the 25 years of constant background combat deployments that most people aren't even aware of happening unless they are extremely impacted by it.
Some more so than others, like the old Onion joke: https://theonion.com/soldier-excited-to-take-over-father-s-o...
It seems like you're arguing against the statement that "This generation [which we'll assume refers to millenials] has the lowest mental toughness".
Then - again, by my reading here, so correct me if I'm misinterpreting you - you attempt to support your counterpoint with a list of events which - while certainly not great - pale, in my opinion, to the day-to-day fear of atomic war and the very real knowledge that even as things stand (e.g., without atomic war), your birthday could still be picked tomorrow, and within months you'll be shipped off to the killing fields. Simply put, it's possible for a thing to be bad, but not as-bad as another thing.
I don't think previous generations were under any illusion of societal stability, except possibly the baby boomers - and they had 'Nam, JFK/MLK, Kent State, Watergate, and COINTELPRO to snap them out of that.
Even with all the events you mention, US society is still far more stable than it was in the past. Of course, it'll seem much less stable if one only chooses to focus on the unstable, but I think it's fair to label that a you-problem.
Don't assume incompetence when simple malice can explain the observations... especially when the topic is a blame game.
A bunch of people in every generation say this.
My grandparents said it about those who got to skip growing up in the depression. Their grandparents about selling everything they owned and moving to America. Some days as I trudge through the snow to work uphill both ways I think of them.
"[Young people] are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances. ... They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it."
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/28169/what-is-th...
Should violinists be? I really doubt it. What about truck drivers? It doesn't seem obvious at all. Tired people make nothing but bad decisions, and inducing someone to work when they're tired other than due to, for example, war, should probably not be permitted. But if so, they should probably be on stimulants, just as fighter pilots sometimes are.
I don't know why you're attacking me on those lines. Do you really think I believe "fatigue" is the same as "battle-hardening"? Like, considering that I actually wrote "shifts that are best described as absolutely insane" and "way too much fire in the trial-by-fire".