Forgive the perhaps tasteless question, but could the stresses of the school/internship/residency cycle feasibly drive a previously sane person to this? (What if an “impending breakup” were thrown into the equation?)

David Schmader—former weed columnist and Stranger associate editor—is the author of the solo plays Straight and Letter to Axl, which he’s performed in Seattle and across the US. His latest...

18 replies on “Dear Doctors, Med Students, and Armchair Psychologists Schooled by Grey’s Anatomy”

  2. The article says he graduated from med school in 2000 but just completed his three year residency. What was he doing during the 8 year interval between med school & residency?

  3. And the guy was 39. That is a lot of years under extreme pressure with at least a few years of lack of sleep. Also the whole MD as God and Super Power mind set could have turned up the heat on the sleep deprivation and pressure. Although endocrinology is a lot like a 9 to 5 job, I think. Hard to know what else might have been going on within the family. Tragic all around.

  5. The paper for the most part hasn’t done any fact checking about post graduate education for physicians. There is no such thing as a three year endocrinology residency. Endo, is a subspeciality of Internal Medicine. Typically an
    Endocrinologist goes to four years of medical school, three to four years of an Internal Medicine residency, and then (possibly after working as Physician specializing in Internal Medicine for a period of time) applies to an Endocrinology fellowship. The fellowship will be two to three years of on the job training and clinical research. Fellowships may be rigorous but are not the same environment you see in literature/TV/movies. The most unpleasant time of Dr. Chen’s training was ancient history by the time he arrived in Seattle.

  7. The Times reporters dug up so much, didn’t they? Age and education disparity, the guy coming out at 39… In my wondering I think about three things. The chance having a kid was meant to fix their relationship and facing up to the reality it wasn’t going to; the adrenaline-fueled residency over with, maybe he came to the usual doctor’s realization that medicine is really just another job; and on top of all that, the possibility of drug use – doctor addicts are usually pretty epic in any case, and to have all those other factors at play….

  8. Compared to the stresses of what?

    Unemployment? Being deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan? Being raised in poverty with a poor education?

    Sorry, wrong question.

  10. Sorry David, but gay people are no more immune to this kind of tragedy than any others. Don’t fall into the trap (as so many “Christians” do) that your particular group that you love and advocate for has somehow elevated itself above human nature. We sometimes do awful things to each other, gay, straight, religious, atheistic. Certainly there were external pressures that “pushed” him to do this, but plenty of people go through those same circumstances without killing, some without even developing a decent drinking problem. What, what, what could ever justify harming a child? Not one thing.

  11. We can all agree that fatal stabbing is not the proper response to stress. No one’s making excuses, just trying to figure out what the fuck happened and why.

  13. @ 11 – A guy who wasn’t wrapped too tightly to begin with flipped out, killed his partner and his child.

    Being gay had nothing to do with it, just as being a doctor had nothing to do with it. As others have said, plenty of people deal with equally onerous stress loads without flipping out and stabbing people.

    This guy had to be cracked to begin with.

  15. Nope.

    Wait, you wanted a more robust answer?

    How about this: the couple moved to Seattle in July, and he was going to start his new job mid-August. At a minumum, he had a couple weeks in there where he was comparatively free from job-related stress.

    I can (almost) see years of job stress piled ontop of relationship stress and you’re having an argument about the breakup and something snaps and you stab your spouse to death. But where the fuck does murdering the kid enter into that equation?

  16. @11: The Seattle Times article indicates he bounced around medical specialites every few years, all around the country.

    More importantly, as a 27-year old, he started dating a 17-year old runaway dropout. Sounds creepy from the get go to me.

  17. Understanding causes ≠ giving excuses, people.

    Isaiah Kalebu has no excuse, but understanding that he had elementary teachers saying “he needs help” while his mother didn’t provide the help, and then had family saying “he needs help” when he was too old for them to force him to get help, and then had legally mandated help that didn’t get followed-up on… That sort of information can help a civil society discuss laws/policies/standards to possibly mitigate such tragedies in the future.

    Wondering whether the stress of the medical training experience is enough to create mental health problems in someone otherwise healthy could provide information to help a civil society discuss standards/policies/laws to possibly mitigate such tragedies in the future.

    David: Mental health professionals often use a <a href="Diathesis–stress model

    ” rel=”nofollow”>stress-diathesis model to understand how and why someone become mentally ill at any particular period in their life. Someone with a more resilient psyche can go through an experience and cope moderately well. Someone who is already at risk for mental-health issues can go through that same experience and have it cause severe psychiatric damage.

    It sounds like this guy had a number of stressors. Stressful profession. Moving. Young child. Recently coming out. Stressful relationship.

    None of those would be enough to move someone who was at no or low risk of mental health problems to psychotic, but someone at moderate risk? Perhaps.

    I don’t see anything in their reported history that would have been able to tip off anyone that there was significant risk of something like this happening, though.

  18. @11,

    Isn’t it possible that he’s just a fucking asshole?

    #16 quite correctly points out that the guy was a creepy fuck-up on multiple levels before he resorted to murder.

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