High rate of suicide among female doctors

Female doctors are twice as likely to commit suicide as other women, according to government-funded research published today.

They take their own lives more often than male colleagues, according to a study which will ring alarm bells in the NHS, which is employing more women in medical posts.

The authors, from Oxford University's department of psychiatry, say ways must be found to combat stress and mental health problems among doctors, of whom more than a third are women. More work is also needed to ascertain why doctors in some specialist areas of medicine, such as community health - which includes family planning clinics, immunisation centres and children's services, anaethestics, psychiatry and general practice - are far more likely to kill themselves than in others.

The findings, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, emerged from a study of 223 doctors in England and Wales who had committed suicide or whose death came from an undetermined cause between 1979 and 1995. Male doctors appeared only two-thirds as likely to kill themselves as members of the general population, although unusually, the suicide rate among male community health doctors was 12 times that of women specialists in this area.

Other research has already demonstrated that GPs are more prone than others to think "suicidal thoughts" and the latest research suggests they are 3.5 times more at risk of putting these into practice than colleagues in general hospital medicine. Seniority was not a factor.

The authors say the risk to women doctors "requires particular monitoring in the light of the very large increase in the numbers of women entering medicine." John Ashton, the journal's co-editor, said : "This is a descriptive study. It doesn't enable us to get into causational links. You would need to do more detailed work."

But he speculated that women doctors, who were often intelligent, high achievers and perfectionists, might have a personality profile that made them more vulnerable.

The British Medical Association said: "There is an urgent need for family-friendly specialities in every speciality. It is particularly important to discover what drives these women to suicide since more than half the current medical graduates are women."

The Department of Health said: "All the strands are coming together to improve doctors' working conditions so hopefully these rates will come down."