Doctors hide their PTSD out of fear for their license

A trauma surgeon spent two decades on call for the worst nights of other people's lives. Then he ran his hospital's pandemic response. Then he could not function. Jeremy Heffner is a trauma surgeon, speaker, and author. This episode is based on his article "Why frontline health care workers get no mental support," published on KevinMD. You will hear how compartmentalizing one case after another works until it does not, and why he was told the system had nothing for him until he was in acute crisis. He describes what he learned about how a board treats a physician who asks for help voluntarily, and the therapy that finally let him talk about a case he had blocked out for years. He explains why untreated trauma often shows up as anger that colleagues read as a character problem. Press play for a direct account of what frontline exposure did to one surgeon, and what he thinks health care owes the people working its front line.

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