Female veterinarians committing suicide in record numbers – By Kimberly Leonard (washingtonexaminer.com) / Dec 20 2018
Female veterinarians are far more likely to kill themselves than the general population, and the majority of deaths among women occur because they have taken euthanasia drugs from their practices, according to a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Experts have been aware for several decades that vets had a particularly high incidence of suicide, but until now they didn’t know how pronounced it was among women. The study, published Thursday in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, found that female veterinarians are 3.5 times more likely to kill themselves than the general population, and male veterinarians are 2.1 times more likely.
Researchers hypothesized that long, stressful work hours, debt from veterinary school, and access to euthanasia drugs used on animals were some of the factors driving the trend.
Though most suicides in veterinarians are done using guns, veterinarians were 2.5 times than the general population to use poisoning to kill themselves, largely because they have access to lethal drugs. Among veterinarians, poisoning was the cause of death for 64 percent of females and 32 percent of males.
The CDC looked at records from 11,620 veterinarians who died between 1979 and 2015. Overall, 75 percent of them worked at a small practice, which can contribute to longer work hours and to high stress associated with administrative tasks.
“Our findings suggest mortality from suicide among veterinarians has been high for some time — spanning the entire 36-year period we studied,” Robert Redfield, director of the CDC, said in a statement. “This study shines a light on a complex issue in this profession. Using this knowledge, we can work together to reduce the number of suicides among veterinarians.”
Since 2000, the proportion of female vets who died by suicide has remained stable, at 10 percent, even though women make up 60 percent of the profession. But over time the number of deaths increased steadily. Another study by a division of the CDC known as the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health found that female vets think about suicide often and have higher incidences of depression, a risk factor for suicide.
The upward trend in suicide echoes others seen in the general population. Suicide, the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S., has been so high in recent years that it has contributed to a decline in life expectancy. In 2016, nearly 45,000 people in the U.S. killed themselves.
