These horrors come to feel normal, and the normal world recedes into distant strangeness. On a recent weekend I took a Pilates class. We stretched and bent and complained about our stressful week. But how can I share anything of my week lightly? Stress seems the wrong word.

On the walk home, I browsed a housewares shop. I wanted to swipe all the rose-gold salad servers and marble cheese plates off the table, smash them to bits. Who let this other world exist? How can we reconcile the two?

As doctors who are more stoic than I will tell you, there is some inevitability to the difficulty of our jobs. Blood and urine and human suffering cannot be escaped. We must face death and our shame for the times we couldn’t hold death back for long enough. We need to know a lot, and that takes time, and that time will be stolen from time that should be spent with children, novels, friends, the ocean. We will make mistakes.

But as we talk about the ways we can halt the progression from distress to burnout to mental illness to death, we are realizing that not all of our suffering is inevitable. There are practical changes that can be made. We know we could improve doctor well-being with better working hours and by changing practices that leave doctors in fear of being branded “impaired” if they seek help for mental distress.

In the aftermath of recent suicides, these are exactly the things that are being proposed in my home state. And Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney is rolling out a program for the well-being of doctors in training, which includes mindfulness and resilience training, and personal training for physical health. Those who have created the program note that when doctors develop skills to manage their own well-being, it makes it easier for them to teach these skills to patients.

Beyond such practical steps, there is the matter of medical culture that must be addressed. The unrelenting, unforgiving culture of medicine that weighs its junior members down with debt and duty. Medicine says you chose this, so don’t complain. Medicine says stop being selfish and think of the patients. Medicine says just one more year and the worst will be over, and medicine keeps saying that year after year.

We need to let go of our shiny doctor selves and accept the vulnerability, doubt and imperfection within, rather than try to obliterate it. We need to find kindness for ourselves, our medical and nursing colleagues, and our patients because sometimes that is the only thing that makes this path bearable. We need a medical culture that sees humanity as a precondition for being a good doctor, not an obstacle.