Inside Higher Ed: Depressed medical professors
Medical school faculty members don’t like their jobs as much as they used to, and their professional despair could trickle down to medical students, according to a report in the January issue of Academic Medicine.
The study, “The Impact of the Changing Health Care Environment on the Health and Well-Being of Faculty at Four Medical Schools,” used 2001 survey responses from 1,457 academic physicians, and found that about one-fifth of them, men and women nearly equally, displayed at least some symptoms of clinical depression, up from 14 percent in a survey of academic physicians in 1984. Nationally, about 11 percent of women and 7 percent of men report symptoms of depressions. Little previous data on the mental health of academic physicians existed for comparison, but the study did find that younger faculty members — those under 35 – reported higher levels of anxiety and less job satisfaction than older faculty members.
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