Grieving wife of country doctor and father opens up after his workload gave him panic attacks before committing suicide – as shocking new report on support for health workers emerges
- Widow opened up about her husband’s death
- Her partner took his own life due to work stress
- Contact Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636 for assistance
A grieving widow has revealed how her husband suffered panic attacks from a country doctor’s overwhelming workload before committing suicide.
Mother and nurse Carly Smalley was left a widow after her husband, a pediatrician and pediatric intensive care specialist Nathan, committed suicide in July. 2020.
Mrs Smalley recalled how her husband’s mental well-being took a turn for the worse leading up to his death, as the pediatrician took medication to stay awake and then some more to help him sleep as he tried to manage his ever-increasing workload hold.
A grieving widow has revealed how her husband suffered panic attacks from a country doctor’s overwhelming workload before committing suicide (pictured, Nathan and Carley Smalley)
Mother and nurse Carly Smalley was left a widow after her husband Nathan committed suicide in July 2020
Her comment comes as the country’s medical regulator, the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency, comes under scrutiny for its support of health professionals.
A new report showed that 16 health workers reported themselves to the regulator between January 2018 and December 2021 before committing suicide.
Ms Smalley said her husband was so stressed and overworked that he resorted to desperate measures to try and stay ahead of the curve.
“As demand increased, Nath took his notes home to write at night, but he was having trouble staying awake, so unbeknownst to me, he started using illegal drugs to keep him awake,” she shared. she. The Daily Telegraph.
Ms Smalley said her husband had sought help from AHPRA in November 2019 but the couple had not heard from them for the first six weeks.
Nathan then received a call on the Friday before Christmas saying his driver’s license had been suspended while they were investigating the matter.
“It was extremely stressful and there was no ‘this is the next step’ or anything,” Ms Smalley said.
Nathan was recommended to see a psychiatrist every day in February 2020 and go to rehab.
Ms Smalley described AHPRA’s communications as “poor” and “ignored” by the medical regulator.
Five months later, in July, Nathan took his own life.
His distraught widow said Nathan had poor self-esteem and esteem and found happiness in helping people.
Mei-Khing Loo lost her obstetric husband Dr. Yen-Yung Yap to suicide in 2020
She said the decision to suspend him from pediatrics devastated him.
“We would go to our little town and see our patients and he just took on all that responsibility of abandoning them on top of everything else,” she said.
AHPRA chief executive Martin Fletcher described the latest report to the medical regulator as “confrontational.”
“The findings of this study are very confronting, but we’ve commissioned it to learn and do better,” he said.
‘We want to understand and change the bottlenecks in our processes that cause the most concern.’
Sixteen people have taken their own lives in the years between 2018 and 2021, while another two have attempted suicide or self-harm.
Mei-Khing Loo lost her obstetric husband Dr. Yen-Yung Yap to suicide in 2020.
Dr. Yen-Yung Yap was banned from performing unsupervised vaginal deliveries while AHPRA investigated a complaint about his use of suction on two babies.
Ms Loo said the stress of the investigation was slowly eating away at him.
“It tore my family apart,” she said.
“That’s the result of these investigations, they’re breaking up families – I think a lot of other families have gone through the same thing as me.”
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