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British vets are very prone to suicide, according to findings published in the latest British Veterinary Association's journal. They are twice as likely to kill themselves as doctors, who are twice as likely to kill themselves as members of the general public.
Among doctors, it is anaesthetists and psychiatrists who kill themselves the most frequently: the former, perhaps, because they have to listen all day to surgeons; the latter because they have to listen to patients.
Two explanations are given for the high suicide rate of vets. The first is that they have access to highly potent horse medicines, of which they can easily self-adminster a fatal dose. The second is that the stress of putting animals to death that are so beloved of their owners causes them recurrent misery.
The first answer implies that there may be a
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large number of people other than vets who would kill themselves, if only they had an easy means of doing so. If barristers were supplied with horse anaesthetic - so the hypothesis goes - they would soon be putting themselves down in large numbers.
The second explanation is more plausible. Anyone who has attended a vet's waiting room knows it has a more cheerful atmosphere than a doctor's waiting room. This is because people generally love their animals more than they do their relatives, or at least have less complex and ambivalent relationships with them.
This means that the death of an animal is more straightforwardly devastating. Their owners' grief is unmixed. Moreover, because animals have shorter lifespans than humans, and euthanasia is the norm, death is more prevalent among a vet's patients than among a doctor's. A dying hamster or guinea pig grieves a child deeply, and the vet causes such grief often, perhaps every day. Most vets love animals too; it is only natural that sometime the strain tells fatally. 
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