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A suicide crisis among veterinarians

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Re: A suicide crisis among veterinarians

#131

Post by hotnfresh »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #39

My wife is a vet. One big issue is that most people don’t have pet insurance. But they do have medical insurance. As a consequence they are completely surprised by the out-of-pocket costs of medical procedures. Hip surgery (to pick something at random) is hip surgery, even if it’s for a dog. It still costs thousands of dollars. But a significant portion of the population expects to pay what they would pay for insuran…

> But a significant portion of the population expects to pay what they would pay for insurance-covered human surgery, eg a couple hundred dollars at most.

Time travelled from the 1990s, or one of the few who’s never had normal middle-class health insurance in the last decade.

I haven’t had a plan that wouldn’t put us into at least high-four-figures if anyone gets actually-sick, since the ‘00s. Not even the best-available plans to me at any time (which I’ve noticed tend to make little or no economic sense, if you run the numbers) would keep it in the hundreds. Mid-thousands at best (and the higher premium just makes it break-even anyway)

[EDIT] Example: a recent tonsillectomy cost us $2,500 or so. We have middling-leaning-good insurance. It's not some ultra-high-deductible thing. Everything went great, no complications, out of the hospital like an hour after waking from surgery. I don't know how people who make median wages afford kids, with medical & housing costs the way they are. A specialist copay for a 30 minute routine check-up visit (fucking prescription med control rules are a cash-cow for doctors, what a joke) of which ten minutes was with a doctor, was $95 out of pocket the other day, for which we received nothing we actually needed aside from checking a bureaucratic box. Surgery of any kind being in the hundreds is fantasy-land from where I sit. Usually I'm shocked at how cheap veterinarian bills are without insurance. They're usually much cheaper than the same thing on a human with insurance.

Re: A suicide crisis among veterinarians

#132

Post by warner25 »

candybar wrote: post #24

We can talk about other negative aspects of being a vet, but the primary factor is that they know how: > But that reality of the job can also colour the way veterinarians view human lives – including their own – and for those already experiencing suicidal ideation, it can provide a simple justification: death is preferable to suffering. In a 2021 survey by pharmaceutical company Merck, 12.5% of the veterinarians surv…

Great comment. I've had an interest in suicide prevention for many years and I think you're right on the mark.

I'm in the US military which has a suicide rate much higher than the general population[1], so prevention is a high priority, and hence my interest. A common thread is clearly that military service members are people who are willing to kill, and think differently about killing and death, and often have access to guns (most often personally owned, because they're gun enthusiasts, not because the military issues guns).

[1] My understanding is that after you adjust for demographics, because most service members are young males, the rate actually isn't higher, but the reality is what it is: we lose more people from suicide every year than combat operations.

Re: A suicide crisis among veterinarians

#133

Post by rednerrus »

runlaszlorun wrote: post #110

This article hit me pretty hard. But I really wish we could find a better term than 'mental health crisis'. I think it's a polite form of victim blaming. At what point are we just gonna admit that we've built a crap world and we oughta have an honest conversation about fixing it?

People spend too much time staring into their phones, consuming simple carbohydrates, and being sedentary. The world is better than it's ever been. We just don't take good care of ourselves.

Re: A suicide crisis among veterinarians

#134

Post by maxwell »

runlaszlorun wrote: post #110

This article hit me pretty hard. But I really wish we could find a better term than 'mental health crisis'. I think it's a polite form of victim blaming. At what point are we just gonna admit that we've built a crap world and we oughta have an honest conversation about fixing it?

Once the Silent Generation and Boomers no longer hold most of the power.

Re: A suicide crisis among veterinarians

#135

Post by flatline »

GlenTheMachine wrote: post #39

My wife is a vet. One big issue is that most people don’t have pet insurance. But they do have medical insurance. As a consequence they are completely surprised by the out-of-pocket costs of medical procedures. Hip surgery (to pick something at random) is hip surgery, even if it’s for a dog. It still costs thousands of dollars. But a significant portion of the population expects to pay what they would pay for insuran…

The cost of preserving life, human or otherwise, has skyrocketed. When I was a kid, it cost $25 for a vet visit and something like $100 for a minor surgical procedure. Adjusted for inflation those are probably about the same today, the difference being there were no major surgical procedures available for pets. Also, the vet did not carry $150k in student loan debt.

A decade ago I had a kitten with heart arrhythmia. The vet suggested we go to a cat cardiologist. To me that seemed insane, it was going to be $1000 just to get inspected. The cat is alive and well today with no cardiologist visit.

What is the value of the kitten’s life when it was a rescue and there are thousands more to pick from if it passed?The reality is that creating life is cheap and plentiful on planet earth. The resources to preserve life are not. If you are privileged you can afford to pay for your pet’s care. That is a sentimental choice for most people, not a practical one. The equation is different for human life, but only by degree. Insurance is only going to do so much, there is a real cost to medical treatment.

Re: A suicide crisis among veterinarians

#136

Post by napierzaza »

candybar wrote: post #24

We can talk about other negative aspects of being a vet, but the primary factor is that they know how: > But that reality of the job can also colour the way veterinarians view human lives – including their own – and for those already experiencing suicidal ideation, it can provide a simple justification: death is preferable to suffering. In a 2021 survey by pharmaceutical company Merck, 12.5% of the veterinarians surv…

It seems like one of the main issues is that vets have super easy access to a quick and painless death, as well as extreme familiarity with it. Just like having access to a gun makes you more likely to suicide. In general people with more access are more likely to commit suicide when they feel that way. Not trying to undermine that they also feel extra depressed due to the job though. I've seen a few of my pets be euthanize and it was torture.

Re: A suicide crisis among veterinarians

#137

Post by rcarr »

deadbeeves wrote: post #94
rcarr wrote: post #17

I'm not really an animal person and I briefly dated a vet once and it always used to crack me up how when she was telling a story she would refer to the animals as patients. Like I get it, animals are sentient, have emotions, are intelligent, have ways of communicating etc. But there is still something inherently funny about this to me, like a sketch show where you're zoomed in on what you assume are two doctors in w…

In reply to your other comment that was flagged: Well, the reason why the Holy Grail killer rabbit is funny is precisely because a rabbit could never jump onto a man's neck and nibble his head off. If killer rabbits were actually a serious yet somehow obscure danger, maybe you'd find it initially funny, but you'd find it much less funny once you've found out many people are losing loved one to the buck-toothed menace…

[flagged]

Re: A suicide crisis among veterinarians

#138

Post by mcpackieh »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #93
hvs wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new owner pays for it.

How does that work, though? Is there a constellation of dog-seeking people hovering around veterinary offices that only want dogs that cost $10k and have recently had major surgery? People who are willing to donate $10k to save a dog's life but consider it very important that the current owner no longer have the dog anymore for some reason?

This is going to change how I view yuppies who tell me they rescued their dog. Was the dog really owned by abusive people before they bought it? Or was the dog owned by a family that loved it but couldn't afford a $10k procedure? Is there a tactful way to ask?

I wish I didn't know such arrangements are happening.

Re: A suicide crisis among veterinarians

#139

Post by maxwell »

rednerrus wrote: post #133
runlaszlorun wrote: post #110

This article hit me pretty hard. But I really wish we could find a better term than 'mental health crisis'. I think it's a polite form of victim blaming. At what point are we just gonna admit that we've built a crap world and we oughta have an honest conversation about fixing it?

People spend too much time staring into their phones, consuming simple carbohydrates, and being sedentary. The world is better than it's ever been. We just don't take good care of ourselves.

What are you talking about?

Peace in Europe is shattered. The former President of the United States has been indicted multiple times on dozens of felony charges. R&D on the killer bipedal robots + assassination drones + AI from your favorite sci-fi movies is nearing completion. Full Nineteen Eighty-Four-style surveillance totalitarianism has been rolled out in occupied China and is at the pilot stage in most western countries.

According to the SlaveVoyages project, almost 13 million people were captured and sold as slaves between the 15th and 19th centuries:

https://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates

Today, 50 million people live in slavery, according to the Walk Free Foundation:

https://www.walkfree.org/global-slavery-index/findings/globa...

Are they spending "too much time staring into their phones, consuming simple carbohydrates, and being sedentary"? The "world is better than it's ever been" for those 50 million slaves? They're just not taking "good care" of themselves?

Can you find any chocolate bars that aren't made from cocoa beans harvested by child slaves in west Africa? (Only ones I've found: https://manoachocolate.com)

Are you saying U.S. police officers extrajudicially executing more Americans in 2019 than mass shooters murdered is "better than it's ever been"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_killings_by_law_enfor...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...

The Bank of England reporting that real wage growth in the 2010s was back to the slowest since the 19th century, and Britons just need to "take good care of" themselves?

https://web.archive.org/web/20161206225850/http://www.bankof...

What's better than it's ever been? TV dramas?

Re: A suicide crisis among veterinarians

#140

Post by alwa »

somenameforme wrote: post #83
lotsofpulp wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not see any evidence of guilting. > The incident involved a four-month-old German Shepherd puppy who'd swallowed a skewer and needed emergency surgery life-saving surgery. The cost of the complicated procedure and after care was close to $10,000 – more than the owner could afford. As a last resort, to avoid euthanasia, the clinic offered her the option to surrender the puppy to a new owner who could cover the co…

Is a million dollars a reasonable price? The point I make is that you might not be able to tell a reasonable price, per se. But you can generally tell an unreasonable price. It's some x-rays, animal quality anesthesia/meds, and labor. It's hard to see how this reasonably adds up to $10,000. Were time not an issue, they could probably take a trip to Mexico, get the operation done for maybe a few hundred dollars, and c…

I have to imagine that a skewer in the squishy parts could result in a wide range of potential injuries. Maybe the specific injury here was just an “x-ray and pliers” kind of job as you suggest, but suppose this particular skewer skewered one or more organs, or resulted in some kind of awful hemorrhage or something. I could just as easily imagine the sort of injury that would require intricate surgeries and a lengthy hospital recovery, implying the round-the-clock attention of a number of specialized humans with mouths to feed and other career prospects (including patching up human animals instead!).

Euthanasia might be the only humane option in an x-ray-and-pliers outfit not staffed and equipped to perform such an heroic sort of intervention in the timeframe it would take to succeed.

One thing that does stand out to me is the extreme shortage of people willing to become veterinarians, even at these prices. It seems like regardless of the pricing on the retail end, capable young people considering modern veterinary life are sizing up the entire financial, emotional, educational, and lifestyle bargain and not finding the payoff to be worth it.

That said, I am sympathetic to the idea that modern veterinary practice has strayed too far from the way it’s done in lesser-resourced settings. Maybe it is more appropriate to set aside advanced and expensive medical techniques in favor of more cheaply-educated practitioners, more conventional business hours, simpler tools and supplies, more frequent recourse to euthanasia, and so on.

The blessing and the curse of modern medicine, no? It’s bad enough to have to face death when it feels inevitable, when “all that can be done to save them” is relatively simple and well-understood. Knowing that the same situation might be survivable under different circumstances—with more money, or in a place with the right practitioner, or if we’d just had this particular exotic antivenom in stock, or if the line had been shorter that night, or if we could hire some bioengineers and a lab to custom-tailor a treatment to puppy’s genes… the same death then comes with a lingering feeling of guilt over the possibility that more could have been done.

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