Finally: Why veterinarians have a high suicide rate

Dr. Will McCauley had just finished his shift at a small Dallas animal clinic when he went home, fed his pet pot-bellied pig and then held a loaded handgun to his head. The 33-year-old veterinarian was wracked with student debt and worn down by the daily demands at work, which included euthanizing dogs and cats and being vilified by pet owners for not meeting their expectations. “I was tired in this miserable state of mind,” he says. “It just drained me so much.” For reasons he attributes to either fear or hope, McCauley didn’t kill himself that summer day in 2016, and he quit his job later that week and stopped practicing.1

As I’ve long suspected, veterinarians are finding conventional practice unfulfilling.

It’s long been known and publicized that my profession has a high suicide rate. It’s much higher than any other medical profession.

The rate of suicide in the veterinary profession has been pegged as close to twice that of the dental profession, more than twice that of the medical profession, and 4 times the rate in the general population2

The 2012 CVMA National Survey Results on the Wellness of Veterinarians (n = 769) found that 19% of respondents had seriously thought about suicide and 9% previously attempted suicide. Of those who had seriously thought about it (n = 135), 49% felt they were still at risk to repeat. The risk is real. The numbers are compelling.3

The usual reasons trotted out

I’ve never been satisfied with the reasons ascribed to this epidemic in my profession.

Work pressures, burn out

Inadequate professional support and professional mistakes, along with other work-related stressors such as long working hours; after hours on-call duties; conflictual relationships with peers, managers, and clients; high client expectations; unexpected clinical outcomes; emotional exhaustion (compassion fatigue); lack of resources; limited personal finances; concerns about maintaining skills; and the possibility of client complaints and litigation can all contribute to anxiety and depression, which increase vulnerability. Long-term exhaustion (burnout), characterized by disillusionment and demoralization, may also increase vulnerability.4

Having to euthanize animals
Demand to do free work

Another soul-crushing aspect of the job that most other health professionals don’t have to deal with, veterinarians say, is constantly being asked to perform services or give out medications for free and then being cyberbullied or harassed if they don’t. In 2018, Americans spent more than $72 billion on their pets, and more than $18 billion was for vet care, according to the American Pet Products Association (APPA)5

Cyberbullied if you don’t work for free? Well, that’s creepy on the part of owners who’d stoop to that. Do they feel entitled to free? What, because they’ve “rescued” some poor animal?

Luckily, those folks never darkened my door.

Getting closer to reality

Finally, a study that’s finding a point much closer to the heart of the matter in my mind has recently been published.

Imagine being up against this wall: your treatments are just plain ineffectual.

All the training, all your knowledge you worked so hard to acquire in all those years in vet school, and, after years of practice, it dawns on you: those chronic cases aren’t really getting better for all your efforts.

That’s called “futile treatment,” and I submit it’s the norm in conventional medicine.

More than 99% of 474 veterinarians surveyed said they’d encountered useless or nonbeneficial veterinary care in their careers, according to a new Cornell-led study that documents the prevalence of futile care for the first time. The authors use a working definition of futile care as continuing treatment when relevant goals can no longer be reached.6

I’ve written about this “dirty little secret” of medicine earlier.

Cure is an impossibility in the very system of medicine that’s the “norm” in the world today. The best that’s accomplished is a modicum of symptom “control” with drugs or surgery.

That’s a lot like seeing the oil light pop on on your car’s dashboard and taping over it with electrical tape because, well, it’s bothersome.

And, while those drugs are sort of controlling things, your animal is really getting no better.

No greater joy of life, no ability to get off the drugs, no improvement in all other aspects of life besides the symptoms being deadened a bit.

The deeper nagging at the vet conscience

Still unspoken of is a far deeper reason for vets to get disillusioned, even to the point of suicide.

I write this as a vet of 42 years who’s been on both sides of the fence.

Conventional practice was the first seven years of my practice life.

And while I was blessed to work in a lovely rural setting with great partners and wonderful clients, it wasn’t until I stepped out of that practice that I saw a bigger picture.

Training in first acupuncture and later homeopathy, my eyes were opened to a far greater reality I’d never realized in my early days:

Much of conventional prevention actually harms your animals.

I’ve been pointing that out for decades now, and I saw it day in and day out as the “doctor of last resort” when the animals presented to me were:

Not only NOT getting better in Dr. WhiteCoat’s practice, but
Were actually getting worse the longer they took part in what passed for “prevention”

Chief among this “Ah ha” was studying the effects of vaccination during homeopathic training. (The term for vaccine injury is “vaccinosis,” a term coined by human physician J. Compton Burnet way back in 1884)

Here I was, surrounded by other holistic veterinarians, some at it much longer than I, and our instructor, Dr. Richard Pitcairn, was showing us case after case illustrating the harm that was coming from vaccination,” recalls Falconer about his awakening. “More significantly, he was also showing us that sick animals usually didn’t get better without, at some point in their treatment, receiving a vaccinosis remedy.7

Greed vs caring and “do no harm”

I’ve always been a bit more innocent than might be good for me.

Early on in my discovery of the long known damaging effects of vaccination, I started blogging about it.

In my innocence, I assumed my colleagues would see the error of their ways and back off on the excessive use of vaccines.

One, that repetition just plain wasn’t helping build more immunity.

Two, and far more importantly, it was causing chronic diseases like allergies and autoimmune disease.

And yet, many years after the main vet associations were urging vets to stop the annual vaccine nonsense, it came to light that some 60% of my colleagues were still pushing this on their clients.

That’s when I stopped forgiving them.

It wasn’t that they didn’t know better. These decisions were fueled by greed and these vets were clearly ignoring the welfare of their patients.

If you knowingly were perpetrating this in your practice of medicine, where the code was to help, not harm them, wouldn’t that eat at you at some level?

That’s worse than “futile treatment” by a mile.

Might that inner conscious awareness of causing harm also be fueling the crazy high suicide rate in the veterinary profession?

It’s always seemed a likelihood to me.

Will that be studied and admitted any time soon?

I seriously doubt it.

It’s one thing to realize your treatments of anything chronic are ineffectual.

It’s another for a profession, especially one that used to be associated with compassion for animals, to come to grips with the fact that in its haste to add more to the bottom line, they were actually causing harm to the innocents.

A way out

To my colleagues who see a glimmer of truth here and want a way out of the quagmire, I’d urge a pause and a retraining.

It often starts with acupuncture training. It’s an amazing body of ancient knowledge that’s been organized into a year long certification training that often opens doors to burned out, disillusioned vets who truly want to help their patients.

Acupuncture is often the gateway to other fields of holistic endeavor. It’s internally logical, it’s physical, and yet it’s deep acting and affects much more than just the physical.

If placing needles in flesh isn’t appealing, you can skip right to where many of us went after that: classical veterinary homeopathic training.

It’s world changing, actually cures patients, and there aren’t nearly enough of us out there doing this work.

For those of you with animals who need a way out of the same quagmire for your animals’ sake, please view my Recommended Resources page for the AVH list and the video I’ve made for you on how to choose a qualified homeopathic vet.

Key understanding: you needn’t have someone located near you to get this amazing work done. For years, I did this with long distance telephone consulting and many of my colleagues offer this service as well.

Let’s get veterinary medicine back to being an honorable profession. One that animal owners can once again trust and one in which vets feel great about their work. The conventional medical model has been broken from the get go and for everyone’s sake, it needs to be stepped beyond.

The comments await you and I’d love to hear your thoughts. Uncivil ones will be deleted. We’re all better than that, even in these challenging times we are living through.