This dubious school of thought has long been acknowledged as standard practice. To be a good doctor you must work harder, stay later, know more, and never falter. Weakness in medicine is a failing and if you admit to struggling it's thought that you simply couldn't hack it. In the cut-throat, brutal culture of medicine, many junior doctors stay stoically mute in the face of daily, soul-destroying adversity. In these worst cases, their loudest gesture is deafeningly silent. The thought of years of knowledge and training being used for such purposes is not only sickening, it is heartbreakingly sad.

Extremely long hours, little financial remuneration (particularly while training), discouragement to claim overtime, and extreme shortage of training places leave many doctors of my generation feeling as if we don't have many options.

Colleagues compete with one another because it's how we have been conditioned to behave – we all know one bad mistake or disagreement with an important superior is all that it takes to end a career you've already devoted seven-plus years of your life to, and you haven't even really started yet.

To not "specialise" is seen as a cop-out – anyone who openly admits to wanting a more lifestyle-friendly medical career path is more often than not looked down upon. You're left feeling much of the time that whatever you do it's simply never going to be quite good enough.

When I asked my friends who are not doctors whether three people in their cohort had killed themselves in the past year, they looked horrified. There would be some kind of inquiry, they said, an investigation, some action. Some kind of introspective analysis into their workplace that tried to find some kind of answer for what had occurred. Doctors tend to receive an email from our management with a link to a counselling service, and then we go to work and pretend as if nothing has happened.