Overcoming addiction and reconnecting with a GP career, with Dr Michael Blackmore

So Michael, as I said in the intro, you've been very open about sharing your own experiences with addiction.

And I think that for many clinicians, there's a sense of it's not going to happen to me because of their training.

So do you have any idea of the sorts of numbers, percentages that are affected in the profession?

I think the numbers quoted by Claire Girard from the Practitioner Health Programme is something like a 10 to 12% career risk throughout your career of using some sort of abnormal coping mechanism that can eventually trip you up if you don't do something about it or seek help.

Is there something about the kind of traits that are often found in healthcare professionals, you know, like being very driven, maybe perfectionism, perhaps being a bit hard on yourselves, combined with the kind of work hard, play hard, medical school thing, does that potentially put healthcare professionals at an increased risk of those coping mechanisms, like you said?

I think we can be very obsessive compulsive at times and like you say perfectionists you kind of have to be to get into medical school and then you know you do work really really hard when I was doing medicine I was quite jealous of the people who were doing arts degrees who weren't in as much as me and yes we partied hard there were medic pub crawls and then there is the uncertainty of medicine I struggled with the analysis paralysis sometimes that comes with difficult cases and I It was a choice of do I make this decision or this decision? And sometimes I struggled to make any decision and that was probably worse for the patient.

So I had to quieten down my monkey mind with some sort of pill, powder or potion.

I thought I'd found the magic way of navigating a medical career, but it turned out that ended up growing arms and legs and almost killing me.

Abnormal coping mechanisms is something that medics more easily slip into because we have access to drugs, the keys to the sweetie cupboard.

Yeah.