Germy

I got the news that another physician had committed suicide a few days ago. Sadly, this is not surprising, but this time it was a person I knew. There has been a lot written recently about physician and medical student suicide and I will leave the numbers and such for other people. What I do want to address is what I perceive to be the underlying reason -- and again, many other smarter and more experienced people than myself have written about this, too. I feel like the suicide epidemic in our society, including physicians, but also other groups seeing huge increases (veterans and children) shares a common cause. As I reflected on the latest bad news, a question that was asked of me in an interview came to my mind. "What is the largest problem facing our society today?" Of course, this can be taken in many different directions, and I've never been asked that before in an interview (although I love these open ended questions -- my main problem is staying focused -- w