QUEBEC

After the suicide of a 27-year-old medical resident less than two weeks ago raised concerns about working conditions for doctors-in-training, Health Minister Gaétan Barrette said med students in Quebec aren’t under too much stress.

“The pressure today is much less than it was, say, 15 years ago,” he said. “It’s much, much, much more accommodating than it was in my time.”

Barrette said medical students aren’t at any greater risk of depression and suicide than the general public. “This is a situation that many, many people unfortunately experience in their life, especially, I would say, in their youth,” he said.

On Nov. 15, Émilie Marchand, a medical resident at Notre-Dame Hospital who had recently taken time off for depression, didn’t show up for work when she was on call. Two days, later she was found dead in her car after committing suicide, La Presse reported.

In a letter, a co-worker of Marchand’s, Étienne Leroux Groleau, said the demands of his residency led him to become excessively anxious. He criticized a “macho and competitive system that, over the years, continues to maintain non-written rules such as that psychological distress is a sign of weakness.”

Marchand’s case doesn’t seem to be an exception. A poll conducted by the Fédération médicale étudiante du Québec found that 1-in-5 medical students has contemplated suicide.

For years, the Federation des médecins résidents du Québec has campaigned to break the taboo surrounding depression within the medical community.

Joseph Dahine, president of the FMRQ, said doctors-in-training are under “tremendous pressure” owing not only to their 55- to 70-hour workweeks. Part of the stress stems from the need to integrate into a new medical team every four-to-eight weeks while cycling through hospital units to learn different specialties.

Another difficulty is to be under the “constant scrutiny” of supervisors, he said. “There is that stress of ‘Am I going to find a job? I need to impress, I need to perform.’ ”

To lessen the burden on residents, Dahine suggested allowing medical residents returning from sick leave to ease back into their busy work schedule with shorter shifts. Unlike some medical professionals including nurses, doctors-in-training are expected to resume their work at full pace.

Dahine said more and more residents have sought help from the Programme d’aide aux médecins du Québec, an independent organization set up in 1990 that offers counselling to doctors struggling with depression, addiction and other problems. Last year, 124 residents phoned the PAMQ for help, its annual report says.

What can’t be counted are the residents who fall between the cracks.

“Each and every failure is a catastrophe,” Dahine said. “It’s a personal trauma for the person who has invested so much into their studies to become a doctor, but it’s also a social trauma, because society has invested so much in these people to become doctors and to care for the population.”

gvendeville@montrealgazette.com

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Geoffrey Vendeville is a reporter in the Montreal Gazette’s Quebec bureau.