Author Interviews, Education, Mental Health Research, University of Michigan / 25.09.2016
Doctors: “I would never want to have a mental health diagnosis on my record”
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
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Dr. Katherine Jo Gold[/caption]
Katherine J. Gold, MD MSW MS
Department of Family Medicine
Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation; Depression Center
University of Michigan
With co-authors Louise B. Andrew MD JD; Edward B. Goldman JD; Thomas L. Schwenk MD
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: It is common knowledge that physicians are often hesitant to seek care for mental health concerns. Knowing that female physicians have increased rates of both depression and suicide, we surveyed female physicians who were mothers and who participated in a closed FaceBook group about their mental health, treatment, and opinions about licensing. More than 2100 U.S. physicians responded, representing all specialties and states.
Almost half of participants reported that at some point since medical school they had met criteria for a mental illness but didn’t seek treatment. Reasons included feeling like they could get through without help (68%), did not have the time (52%), felt a diagnosis would be embarrassing or shameful (45%), did not want to ever have to report to a medical board or hospital (44%), and were afraid colleagues would find out (39%). Overall, 2/3 identified a stigma-related reason for not seeking help.
Almost half reported prior diagnosis or treatment, but just 6% of these women stated they had disclosed this to a state medical board on a licensing application, though states vary on what information they require be disclosed.
Dr. Katherine Jo Gold[/caption]
Katherine J. Gold, MD MSW MS
Department of Family Medicine
Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation; Depression Center
University of Michigan
With co-authors Louise B. Andrew MD JD; Edward B. Goldman JD; Thomas L. Schwenk MD
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: It is common knowledge that physicians are often hesitant to seek care for mental health concerns. Knowing that female physicians have increased rates of both depression and suicide, we surveyed female physicians who were mothers and who participated in a closed FaceBook group about their mental health, treatment, and opinions about licensing. More than 2100 U.S. physicians responded, representing all specialties and states.
Almost half of participants reported that at some point since medical school they had met criteria for a mental illness but didn’t seek treatment. Reasons included feeling like they could get through without help (68%), did not have the time (52%), felt a diagnosis would be embarrassing or shameful (45%), did not want to ever have to report to a medical board or hospital (44%), and were afraid colleagues would find out (39%). Overall, 2/3 identified a stigma-related reason for not seeking help.
Almost half reported prior diagnosis or treatment, but just 6% of these women stated they had disclosed this to a state medical board on a licensing application, though states vary on what information they require be disclosed.
Dr. Sunita Sah[/caption]
Sunita Sah MD PhD
Management & Organizations
Johnson Graduate School of Management
Cornell University
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr. Sah: Physicians often recommend the treatment they specialize in, e.g., surgeons are more likely to recommend surgery than non-surgeons. Results from an observational study and a randomized controlled laboratory experiment found that when physicians revealed their bias toward their own specialty, patients were more likely to report increased trust in the physician’s expertise and take the treatment in accordance with the physician’s specialty. 
Dr. Sara Brownell[/caption]
Sara E. Brownell PhD
School of Life Sciences
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr. Brownell: Our group has been broadly interested in gender biases in introductory biology
since we published a study that showed that women underperform on course
exams and under participate in whole class discussions compared to men
(http://www.lifescied.org/content/13/3/478.full). We were curious why women
might be under performing on these course exams so in this new study, we
examined characteristics of the exams to see if that had an impact. What we
found was that women and men perform equally on questions that test basic
memorization. However, when questions tested more higher-level critical
thinking skills, women were not scoring as high as men. This happened even
when we took into account the academic ability of the students - women and men
who had the same ability coming into the class. We also found that students
from lower socioeconomic statuses also underperformed on these higher-level
critical thinking questions compared to students from higher socioeconomic
statuses, again even when we took into account academic ability.
Dr. Reshma Jagsi[/caption]
Reshma Jagsi, MD, DPhil
Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr. Jagsi: There has recently been considerable media attention to certain egregious individual cases of sexual harassment, but it has been less clear whether these cases were isolated and uncommon incidents or whether they are indicative of situations more commonly experienced by academic medical faculty. An excellent survey study had previously documented that 52% of female faculty in 1995 had experienced harassment, but many of those women had attended medical school when women were only a small minority of the medical students (let alone faculty). More recent estimates of faculty experiences are necessary to guide ongoing policies to promote gender equity in an era when nearly half of all medical students are women.
We found that in a modern sample of academic medical faculty, 30% of women and 4% of men had experienced harassment in their careers.
Mallory Kidwell[/caption]
Mallory Kidwell, B.A.
Project Coordinator at the 
Dr-Daniel Benjamin[/caption]
Dr. Daniel J. Benjamin PhD
Associate Professor (Research), USC, 2015-present
Associate Professor (with tenure), Cornell, 2013-2015
Assistant Professor, Cornell University, 2007-2013
Research Associate, NBER, 2013-present
Faculty Research Fellow, NBER, 2009-2013
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Dr. Benjamin: Educational attainment is primarily determined by environmental factors, but decades of twin and family studies have found that genetic factors also play a role, accounting for at least 20% of variation in educational attainment across individuals. This finding implies that there are genetic variants associated statistically with more educational attainment (people who carry these variants will tend on average to complete more formal education) and genetic variants associated statistically with less educational attainment (people who carry these variants will tend on average to complete less formal education). But none of these genetic variants had been identified until our 2013 paper on educational attainment. That paper, which studied a sample of roughly 100,000 individuals, identified 3 genetic variants associated with educational attainment, each of which has a very small effect. In the current paper, we expanded our sample to roughly 300,000 individuals, with the goal of learning much more about the genetic factors correlated with educational attainment.
Dr. Yeh[/caption]
Dr. James Song-Jeng Yeh, MD
Brigham and Women's Hospital
Boston MA
MedicalResearch.com: What is the purpose for this study?
Dr. Yeh: A number of factors influence physicians’ prescribing behavior, including physician’s knowledge and understanding of the drugs. Pharmaceutical detailing and financial incentives may affect such behavior. My interest in evidence-based medicine and how medical knowledge is translated into practice lead me to think about how physicians’ financial relationships with the pharmaceutical industry may affect prescribing patterns.
In our study, we linked the Massachusetts physicians open payment database with the Medicare drug prescription claims database to determine if financial relationships with the industry are associated with increased brand-name statin drug prescribing. The open payment database reports payments that physicians receive from pharmaceutical and medical device industries. The open payment database when linked to the drug prescription claims database allowed us to answer this question.
We looked at year 2011, when two of the most commonly prescribed brand-name statin drugs (Lipitor and Crestor) were not yet available in generic formulation.
The outcome measured was what percentage of all statin prescription claims (both generic and brand-name) were brand-names.
Dr. Alison Fecher[/caption]
Alison M. Fecher, MD
Assistant Professor of Surgery
Indiana University Health
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Dr. Fecher: It has long been known that female faculty are underrepresented in departments of surgery at U.S. medical schools. Our study wanted to identify obstacles women face in entering certain surgical subspecialties and in career advancement. We found that women are poorly represented in some of the most competitive subspecialties, including cardiothoracic and transplant surgery. We also found that women tend to advance more slowly up the career ladder, with many of them spending more years at the assistant professor level than their male counterparts. One reason for this may be that they tend to publish less peer-reviewed articles than male faculty; however, our results show that the publications of female faculty often has a greater impact on the field, as measured by citations and recentness of articles.
Dr. Joan Luby[/caption]
