THURSDAY, Nov. 20, 2025 (HealthDay News) -- Mental health and substance use (MHSU) visits are common among physicians and increased substantially during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a research letter published online Nov. 18 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Maya A. Gibb, M.P.H., from the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute in Ontario, Canada, and colleagues examined temporal patterns in MHSU-related health care visits among 29,662 physicians. The annual age-sex standardized proportion of physicians with one or more outpatient MHSU visits between July 1, 2003, and June 30, 2022, was calculated.
The researchers found that 11.0 percent of the physicians had one or more outpatient MHSU visits. The standardized proportion of physicians with MHSU visits per year was generally stable during the prepandemic period (12.5 percent in 2003-2004 to 12.1 percent in 2018-2019). During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an increase in the standardized proportion of physicians who had MHSU care, with larger increases seen in the first two years compared with the third year (14.6, 15.2, and 14.4 percent in 2020-2021, 2021-2022, and 2022-2023, respectively). MHSU care varied considerably by specialty before the pandemic, with 28.0, 14.2, and 9.7 percent of psychiatrists, family physicians, and all other specialty physicians, respectively, with one or more MHSU in 2018 to 2019. Mental health care increased among physicians for all specialties during the pandemic, except for psychiatry, which remained stable.
"Current concerns over a physician mental health crisis may not reflect a new crisis but rather highlight a longstanding pattern of adverse physician mental health that was exacerbated during the pandemic," the authors write.