LETTER: Suicidal doctors need to feel they are allowed to ask for help
It may be insensitive to comment on Prof Bongani Mayosi’s death since it must still be painful in the extreme for his family. I can only guess at the extent of the stupendous burden of expectations from himself and from those around him that he shouldered in taking on the deanship of the faculty of health sciences at the University of Cape Town. He seems to have sustained enough psychic trauma in 2016 from abusive students to result in post-traumatic stress disorder. Deanships in medical faculties are notoriously difficult to manage with the competing demands of students, teachers and researchers constantly at play. In Laying Ghosts to Rest (2008), Dr Mamphela Ramphele describes how, as vice-chancellor of UCT, she was subjected to the stresses of protesting students, faculty resistance to transformation and the demands of fractious ambitious academics. Mayosi may also have been vulnerable in the way that many creative researchers are. In former times, scholars often led cloistered l...
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