The health of young and future doctors has suffered greatly from the health crisis linked to Covid-19: this is revealed on Wednesday October 27 by a study * carried out by three unions of young doctors (ISNI, Isnar-IMG and ANEMF). According to this study, conducted among 11,754 undergraduate medical students, external and internal, 75% of those questioned presented anxiety symptoms of varying severity. In a previous study in 2017, they were 66%. The health crisis is one of the explanatory factors for this worsening of the mental health of medical students, according to the union.
In addition, 39% of them have depressive symptoms (compared to 27.7% in 2017) and 67% of interns and externs experience a burnout syndrome – or burnout. Among undergraduates, 39% experience a burnout. If the mental difficulties of these students have increased, suicidal thoughts are on the other hand less frequent: 19.9% of respondents say they have had it, against 23.7% in 2017.
In addition, a quarter of respondents say they have been victims of humiliation or sexual harassment, and sometimes even sexual assault. “This violence was inflicted in the hospital for the vast majority of them by thesis doctors”, specifies the report.
According to the study, the analysis of the responses to the questionnaire makes it possible to distinguish “three groups of difficulties related to the psychological health of medical students and interns” : study and working conditions (64.2% of the text corpus, i.e. “the overwhelming majority”), consequent psychopathological disorders (26%) and gender-based and sexual violence suffered (8.8%).
* Study conducted among 11,754 students and interns who responded to a questionnaire available for six weeks between May and June 2021. In order to allow a rigorous analysis of the responses, internationally recognized scales were used with general thresholds for global measures of Mental Health. Of the 11,754 students who responded to the study, 3,167 were undergraduate, 4,785 graduate (external) and 3,764 graduate (intern). The level of study of 38 students is not specified.