Every September, the American Medical Women’s Association joins with other organizations to recognize National Physician Suicide Awareness Day as part of our longstanding commitment to supporting the health and well-being of women physicians.
For AMWA, this work is deeply connected to our mission. Women physicians have made extraordinary contributions to medicine, yet the data remind us that the profession itself can exact a profound toll.
A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis published in The BMJ found that women physicians had a higher rate of suicide compared to women in the general population. More recent U.S. research, published in JAMA Psychiatry, similarly found that from 2017 through 2021, female physicians had a 53% higher risk of suicide than female nonphysicians.
The disparities extend to physician well-being more broadly. According to 2025 data from the American Medical Association, 46% of women physicians reported at least one symptom of burnout, compared with 37% of men.
How can we better support our own communities?
AMWA has joined efforts calling on medical licensing boards, hospitals, health systems, credentialing organizations, and other institutions to remove intrusive or stigmatizing questions about mental health treatment. Physicians should not have to choose between seeking needed care and worrying that doing so could jeopardize their careers.
We have been proud to work with the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes’ Foundation and others advancing this work. There has been meaningful progress. As of May 2026, the Foundation’s Wellbeing First Champion Challenge reported that 74 health professional licensing boards and thousands of hospitals and health care facilities had removed intrusive mental health questions from licensing or credentialing applications, helping create a safer path to care for more than 3.35 million health workers.
But there is more work to do.
This month as we celebrate the achievements of women physicians during Women in Medicine Month, we must also commit ourselves to creating a profession in which women physicians can truly thrive.
That means building workplaces in which asking for help is seen as a sign of insight rather than weakness. It means addressing burnout not simply through individual interventions, but through meaningful organizational change. It means looking at the inequities and workplace pressures that disproportionately affect women physicians. And it means creating communities in which we notice when a colleague is struggling and feel empowered to reach out.
On September 17, National Physician Suicide Awareness Day, let’s remember those our profession has lost. Let us continue working to remove the stigma surrounding mental health care. And let us recommit ourselves to building a culture of medicine in which caring for those who care for others is not an afterthought, but a fundamental responsibility.
Supporting physician well-being ultimately strengthens our profession, our health care system, and the care we provide to every patient.
References:
· Physician suicide: Zimmermann C, et al. Suicide rates among physicians compared with the general population in studies from 20 countries: gender stratified systematic review and meta-analysis. BMJ. 2024;386:e078964. Female physician suicide rate ratio: 1.76 (95% CI 1.40–2.21). https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj-2023-078964
· U.S. physician suicide: National Incidence of Physician Suicide and Associated Features. JAMA Psychiatry. Using 2017–2021 U.S. data, female physicians had an overall suicide incidence rate ratio of 1.53 (95% CI 1.23–1.87) compared with female nonphysicians.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2830401
· Burnout: AMA 2025 National Physician Comparison data: 46% of women physicians versus 37% of men reported burnout symptoms. This is actually down from 47.2% versus 38.9% in 2024, but the gender gap persists.
https://www.ama-assn.org/practice-management/physician-health/what-s-behind-persistent-gender-gap-physician-burnout