Dr Andrew Bryant’s partner battles to end doctors’ mental health stigma

Medicopolitical

By Julie Lambert

19 May 2021

Four years after gastroenterologist Dr Andrew Bryant shocked his friends and family by taking his life in his Brisbane rooms, his widow continues her mission to overturn stigma about mental health and suicide among doctors.

In a lengthy interview on ABC radio, Susan Bryant explains that she was shocked and disbelieving when police delivered the news that her kind and caring husband had suicided at age 54, in May 2017. But in retrospect, the signs were there.

“I remember saying, ‘That can’t be true.  He wouldn’t do that.’  There was a lot of disbelief around it,” she said on ABC Conversations.

“It was just so out of character for someone who loved life so much as he did.  He was the last person you would think that would be the way he would die.”

She described how Dr Bryant combined running a private practice for 20 years with hospital work and was often called out during the night to attend patients.  It was normal for him to be tired, but towards Easter he began to show signs of being unusually stressed and exhausted.

“Doctors work such long hours and if you have a private practice you’re basically on call all the time. His normal day was, he’d be out at 7am and he would sometimes be home for dinner but often he’d be home after we had all eaten,” Susan said.

The week before he died was “the on-call week from hell”.  Dr Bryant was called three or four times per night; one night he had just arrived back from the hospital when he was called back out again.

He was stressed and anxious, worried about keeping up with his work and having trouble sleeping. It was out of character, two days before his death, when he shed tears at the family dinner table about a patient who had died that day.

“He cared a lot about his patients, but it was very unusual.  I never saw him crying about a patient at home, and he seemed very miserable about everything … to see him in tears was very unusual.”

Four years later, Susan Bryant  says she still feels a “huge sense of shock” and admits she has struggled with a sense of guilt.

“There’s a part of the brain that thinks, ‘What sort of wife can let her husband become suicidal and not do anything about it?  And not even notice, or know, he had depression?’

In Dr Bryant’s case, she suspects his decision to take his life came suddenly.

“Of course, I’ve thought long and hard about whether he was thinking about suicide…   But a lot of factors lead me to think it was an impulsive thing, that he went to work and was sitting in his office and decided there and then.”

After Dr Bryant’s funeral, Mrs Bryant was determined that the manner of his death should not be treated as a shameful secret.

She wrote an email to colleagues and neighbours reflecting on how a normally sociable, happy man had deteriorated under the strains of his practice until the unimaginable happened.  Posted on Facebook, the email went viral with her plea for an end to silence about mental health and suicide in the medical profession.

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