PHYSICIAN SUICIDE

PHYSICIAN SUICIDE
&
The misshapen chaos of well seeming forms

Were I a soldier in an infinite army of like minded individuals, I might march to the same beat, move the limbs in the slow and sculpted movement of experienced sinews, hold my head in the temperate form paralleling the majesty of the uniform, sing to the tunes of the collective, view the world from the same pulpit as the preacher and file away the dreams of my youth in the forbidden corners of my imprisoned personal vanity. All semblance of me buried in the form of a single line made of the infinite numbers of similar dots.

But I am not a wanton of simplistic pleasures of agreeability or contextually. I am not the victim of the mind that seeks to swim in the collective tank. I am the unum that desires to seek the fortunes of knowledge, not the pecuniary one but the enlightened angel that hides behind the soft covers of group think beast.

The misshapen chaos of the well seeming forms have come to haunt us. They disguise in the costumes so appealing and seemingly enduring that the lust for the luster and desire for the hues overpowers the senses. These chaotic circles envelope us in our entirety casting a stranglehold on our imagination, our essence, our individuality and our thoughts.

Such is the price we pay for these well seeming forms that caress and cajole our minds. A price too steep, I think, that threatens our very humanity.

Does the calculated mind that oversees such calamity not understand the consequence of its actions? I dare say, it does not. For even as it displeases, it continues to erect newer barriers and rings of confusion around the substance of those well meaning forms. The barriers get higher and higher as their depth gets deeper and deeper, becoming fortresses within fortresses all encased in the realm of meaning well.

Forms such as these, so cruel to the touch that they freeze the fingers, which probe. So dense that they repel the thought that dares and so vicious that they resort to violence against the mind that wonders, captivatingly ossifying any inkling that might threaten them.

These forms take human lives in the form of suicide. Physician suicides. Doctor losses arising from the untimely frost on the wisest minds that roam. These forms bury the architecture of experiential wisdom under the guise of “think not, do,” a form so beguiling that baser natures cannot repudiate. So what if a few die, so what if the many don't get what they should, in the end there is no readiness.

The chaos that ensues destroys the very foundation of the structure that once stood for health and happiness guarded by the wiser angels amongst us. Now the ruins spread like a conflagration, destroying everything but leaving behind a trail of embers; the charred remains of a once polite and very human loving thought.

Physicians take their own lives, mentally shattered from the compressive force of bureaucracy that claims other’s safety by erecting maze upon maze of uncertainty and demand. The maze so clever that exits are all but closed after the entry. Only the solid wall of policies, regulations and mandates exist as you run through the maze, constantly reaching dead ends that never seem to end. Retracing steps to see where one went wrong only to find another dead end. In these hurdles, faced with the never ceasing complexity of the demands, the mind gives up. The center ceases to fathom and cannot hold together the psyche made so fragile by the fear that grinds at the root of every measured step taken. No one is the wiser of the scars that never felt the wound. it seems that no one cares.

When 300-400 physicians commit suicide and female physicians have a 250-400% increased risk of suicides as compared to females in other professions, and 9.4% of the final year medical students are dazed and lost to this monster annually, something is terribly wrong! Something rots at the core of this accelerating phenomenon.

Medicine is complex, Medical care is an art and less of a science than what is believed in the current reductionist society, so tempered with the lust of prediction and probability. The demise of good medical care is near and continues to collapse at the periphery under the erected weighty barriers and threatens one day soon to collapse the center as well. It is humanity’s Hadrian wall.

What resurfaces from this creative destruction is a future of disembodied humans, of virtual machines, of deprivation and an unimaginable lust for the shiny object that will fail to define the better angels of our humanity.

“Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied
And vice sometimes by action dignified”

Am I a nihilist? I often wonder. But the recent past has been accelerating at breakneck speed for me to be otherwise. We have arrived at the misshapen chaos that no one seems to understand all erected on the foundation of well seeming forms!