Dawn Villella for The New York Times
Dr. Steven Miles spent three years battling Minnesota
licensing officials who wanted access to his private psychiatric records.
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And that might have been the end of it, a small rough patch in
a career of otherwise uninterrupted success.
But the medical profession, Dr. Miles and 14 other authors
contend in a recent article in The Journal of the American Medical Association,
has been slow to accept that depression and other mental disorders are illnesses
like any other, at least when they occur in its own members.
Many doctors fail to seek treatment for psychiatric conditions
out of fear that doing so will damage their careers. And those who do get
treatment can suffer very real professional penalties. Dr. Miles, for example,
spent three years battling state licensing officials who wanted access to his
private psychiatric records.
In the journal article, Dr. Miles and his colleagues, who
gathered last October to discuss doctors' mental health at a workshop convened
by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, noted that the profession's
sluggishness in addressing the issue stands in contrast to its involvement in
other public health problems.
In combating tobacco, for example, medical practitioners have
taken the lead. Deaths from smoking-related illnesses like cancer and heart
disease are lower among doctors than in the population at large, and they have
dropped 40 to 60 percent over the last four decades, the authors noted. Cont
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