Suicide, affective disorder, and women physicians.

Recent publications have noted a rate of suicide for women physicians considerably higher than that for women in the general population. The authors comment on some of the methodologic problems involved in this research and discuss the interaction between affective disorder and suicide as but a partial explanation of the higher risk of suicide among women physicians. The authors conclude that a number of risk factors are involved both in the relatively high lethality rate of some groups of professional women and in the relatively low lethality rate of women in general.