Beneath the White Coat

This timely book offers a balanced and thoughtful review of the current mental health emergency and its impact upon and among medical professionals, supported by the best available evidence and illustrated through real-life cases. Recognising the increasing stressors in the role including the impact of the environment in which doctors work, the book examines some of the key emotional drivers for this unhappiness among doctors at work - shame, stigma, suffering and sacrifice - and offers practical steps to emotional and physical recovery. Despite the obvious challenges and stresses of the role, with the right support in place the vast majority of doctors can thrive in their jobs. In reading this book, policy makers, politicians, educators, hospital managers will be reminded of the ethical duty to ensure that doctors are cared for and have access to the time, people and spaces to remain psychological healthy, while doctors will learn to recognize and seek actively the help that they need, and to support and guide one another.

Dr Clare Gerada has been a medical practitioner since 1982. Having first trained in psychiatry she became a GP in 1992, and has worked in the same practice ever since. She has been heading up a groundbreaking service for sick doctors (practitioner-patients) since 2008 which has rapidly become an international leader. Between 2010-2013 she led the Royal College of General Practitioners, the largest of all the of Royal Colleges, and only the second women to hold this Office in its history.

Acknowledgements. Contributors. Preface. THE MAKING OF A DOCTOR. The making of a doctor: medical self and group of belonging. Mental illness in doctors: an historical context. What makes medicine such a difficult task master and doctors at. higher risk of mental illness?. Rising levels of mental illness, fact or fiction?. Surviving and thriving in medicine. Resilience. Shame in medicine. Suffering, sacrifice and stigma. DOCTORS AND THEIR ILLNESSES. Doctors and mental illness: an overview. Doctors and substance misuse disorder. Autism in doctors. Burnout in doctors. Suicide in doctors and its sequelae. Bipolar disorder and other psychotic states. COVID-19 and mental illness. DOCTORS AS PATIENTS. Doctors as patients. Doctors treating doctors. The doctors' doctor. How to be a good enough patient: from sickness to health. Services for mentally ill doctors. The migrant doctor. Medical students. Different specialities and risk of mental illness. Talking helps. WHEN THINGS GO WRONG. Sticking to the rules: professional and unprofessional behaviour. Making sense of the regulatory process. Improving the outcome of a serious investigation. Index.