Wellness: Suicide Prevention in Veterinary Medicine

The ACVS Foundation understands the importance of this topic. To remove any financial barriers to participation, the ACVS Foundation is generously subsidizing 100 percent of the cost of producing this timely webinar. Registration fees are waived for all participants.
Depression, anxiety, and suicide plague our profession. Signs often go unrecognized or are ignored as we struggle to talk about mental health. For every seven of you who are reading this, one has considered suicide at some point. Most of us personally know or know of someone who has committed suicide. This webinar provides information on the most common reasons veterinarians contemplate suicide and proven tools that we can use as colleagues to help minimize the risk or even prevent it.

Dr. David R. Andrews served over 21 years on active duty in the military. He deployed to combat four times before being wounded-in-action while serving as a combat advisor in Afghanistan. The medical evacuation flight was one of the longest, loneliest moments in his life—a journey filled with anxiety over the extent of his injuries and, worse, unanswerable questions about how he would provide for his single-income family of six. The flight started a long and difficult road to recovery and self-discovery of life after injury and with permanent disability that meant he could no longer serve on active duty.

Dr. Earl M. Gaughan received his doctor of veterinary medicine degree from the University of Georgia, and he completed his equine surgery residency at the New York State College of Veterinary Medicine, Cornell University. He worked in equine veterinary medicine in both private practice and the classroom before joining the Merck Animal Health team as an equine professional services veterinarian in 2013.

Facilitator: Eric Parente, DVM, DACVS

• Professor of Surgery
• University of Pennsylvania
• Kennett Square, Pennsylvania