Dr. Taylor Miller is a veterinarian and mental health professional with Not One More Vet, a group that’s working to combat the high rate of suicide in the field of veterinary medicine.
Research shows that veterinarians are twice as likely as other medical professionals, and four times more likely than the general population to die by suicide.
Dr. Miller spoke about how the framing of life-or-death, success-or-failure in veterinary medicine can impact the mental health and well-being of vets and vet students.
Missouri Health Talks gathers Missourians’ stories of access to healthcare in their own words.
Dr. Taylor Miller: As humans, we each develop some version between a spectrum of a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. A fixed mindset is how it sounds – it's fixed. I am either smart or not smart. I am successful or not successful.
In medicine, there is a lot that contributes to a fixed mindset because either you're smart enough to save your patient or you're not.
We are told from the very, very beginning in vet school that if you don't get this right, your patient might die.
"There's this sense that if I don't get this right, if I don't learn this the first time, then the big “or else” comes in, then this sense of dread and doom comes in."Dr. Taylor Miller
The consequences for any mistake always seem to trickle over to that statement – your patient will die, and it will be your fault.
And there's this unspoken sense of doom that you will not be worth anything because your patient will have died. It will have been your fault. You will have failed.
So, there's this mindset that gets reinforced early on – that creativity and growth and learning, that whole process, which is inherently filled with mistakes because you can't learn something perfectly the first time –and so, we set up this mindset that success and failure are close companions.
That you're only one slight misstep away from failure and one slight misstep away from failure means you're one slight misstep away from killing your patient, which means you're one slight misstep away from being some horr – usually, there's not words for it, it's just this sense, this this overwhelming feeling of failure and doom and sadness and disappointment.
If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.
And when the line is that short or small between failure and success, every single – and I know I'm overstating this. I'm making this more dramatic than perhaps it is – but in many cases, there's this sense that if I don't get this right, if I don't learn this the first time, then the big “or else” comes in, then this sense of dread and doom comes in.
And when teaching methods, especially in the clinical year, reinforce this mindset – we lose a sense of safety around the process of learning, which makes the need to learn almost this traumatic experience. That I have to get it right the first time or else.
And that's not how we learn, and it doesn't make learning engaging, and it makes learning, or the process of learning in front of people, scary.
When we have all this language that reinforces this fixed mindset, we end up with rigid learners, and rigid learners are subject to breaking just like anything that's rigid.
And where that starts, where that impact hits – is that self-concept, that sense of being okay, and if you can't feel okay while you're trying to learn the profession in a setting that is meant to teach, of course, education and the veterinary profession is going to feel traumatic.
