As though medical school wasn’t difficult enough, now new research suggests that internship is even more difficult.
In a study of 740 medical students who were on internship, researchers (Sen et al., 2010) found that nearly 4 percent of the students met the criteria for depression before their internship started.
That number jumped to over 25 percent of students when the researchers measured their depression level at four points over the course of the internship year. That’s right — 1 in 4 medical students on internship suffer from serious, clinical depression.