Recent data, including an unpublished survey conducted in the fall of 2020 and presented at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting in May, suggest that as many as 36% of front-line physicians suffer from the condition. Even before the pandemic, 16% of emergency physicians self-reported symptoms of PTSD. Psychiatrist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. “ saw their colleagues die or had to intubate their co-workers, and they had to worry about ending up that way themselves. “They were all coming, all coughing, all needing help, and I couldn’t possibly help them all,” she explains. In one, she watched hundreds of patients march toward her hospital. By the fall, she had developed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), including recurring nightmares. “I didn’t know if I would ever see them again,” she says.īankhead-Kendall moved to Texas that summer to start a new job as a trauma surgeon, but her experiences took a toll on her. So later that month, after finishing a 24-hour shift, she flew to Texas and left them with her parents. “We were offering the best we had, but patients just kept dying anyway - and then more would come,” she recalls.Īdding to her stress was Bankhead-Kendall’s fear that she could infect her two young children. When COVID-19 hit Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital in March 2020, Brittany Bankhead-Kendall, MD, shifted from training in trauma and surgical critical care to working 80-hour weeks in a COVID-19 intensive care unit. She is shown here scrubbing in for surgery.Ĭourtesy: Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center Brittany Bankhead-Kendall, MD, now a trauma surgeon at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, saw a flood of deaths during the pandemic and has suffered symptoms of PTSD.
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