Title: 'Doctors can't be depressed' | The Independent | The Independent
Headings: 'Doctors can't be depressed'
'Doctors can't be depressed'
What happens when a medic has a mental health problem? Dr Liz Miller found out the hard way
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Content: It simply wasn't done." Dr Miller's illness, manic depression (now known as bipolar disorder), struck in her late 20s and has shaped her life. But what has shaped her career was the way the medical profession responded to her illness – with incomprehension followed by rejection and denial. She responded by setting up the Doctors' Support Network for others in her position, and by writing a book – a guide to avoiding mental illness without the help of doctors, by noting your feelings and acting on them – something she says the medical profession signally failed to do for her. " If they had been nice to me, I need not have done any of this. It would have saved me all the trouble," she says. Liz was 28 and training in neurosurgery in Edinburgh when she had her first breakdown in the mid-1980s. She was doing research on sodium metabolism, speaking at international conferences and had a promising career ahead of her. One professor called Liz "the brightest young thing in neurosurgery" in a decade. "That was when things went belly up.