Thread by @FinancialTimes

Burnout and the burden of life-and-death decisions during the pandemic have driven exhausted front-line staff to the edge. Some shared their experiences with us: on.ft.com/39cGmLO

Doctors who are struggling with their mental health often find themselves in a vicious bind: in a culture of stoicism that stigmatises weakness, they can be reluctant to seek help, particularly when it requires them to consult with colleagues on.ft.com/39cGmLO

The bleak reality illustrates a deeper crisis that long predates the pandemic: an undercurrent of burnout and mental illness plaguing a profession that should be uniquely placed to look after itself on.ft.com/39cGmLO

In 1973, the American Medical Association published a landmark paper acknowledging that doctors, popularly viewed as invulnerable, were struggling with mental illness at far higher rates than the general public. Yet, support is still lacking today on.ft.com/39cGmLO

As waves of patients flooded the wards at the start of the pandemic, several people quit their residency programmes, some were suicidal, and a cohort of newly qualified doctors were frequently working 80-hour weeks on.ft.com/39cGmLO

A paper in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology found that, during the first wave of the pandemic, 22% of all UK medical staff met the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder, 47% for anxiety and the same number for depression on.ft.com/39cGmLO

In addition to witnessing extraordinarily high volumes of death and suffering over the past year, many medical workers have been forced to make unprecedented ethical decisions that they would never have been faced with in normal practice on.ft.com/39cGmLO

While there are signs of progress — China, the US and UK made programmes and funding available during the pandemic to support staff — some critics argue that such provisions are often too little, too late on.ft.com/39cGmLO