The acute suicide crisis among veterinarians: ‘You’re always going to be failing somebody’

Very often, owners are unable to afford the treatments and surgeries to address their pets’ ailments, which puts veterinarians in the difficult position of being medically able to help, but unable to administer care without fees. One of the most common criticisms veterinarians receive is that they’re greedy. Doctors and staff are often asked to give discounts or waive fees, and owners can get upset when the answer is no. 

“People just don’t understand; they don’t get that it is a business,” says Jess Feliciano, a veterinary technician at the same emergency practice as Volk. “They want to know why we can’t make it cheaper, or just bill them. We have people tell us, ‘You’re supposed to be in this to save animals, not kill them.’ It’s heart-breaking because it’s all fuelled by emotion. People just want somewhere to point their anger.”

Taylor Miller, a veterinarian, mental health counsellor and board member of Not One More Vet (NOMV), an advocacy non-profit founded after the death of Dr Yin, says these financially driven conflicts can cause deeply distressing ethical dilemmas. A contributor to poor mental health, she says, “is moral distress: the idea that I cannot accomplish what my sole purpose should be, which is to care for an animal, because there are barriers to that care, one of the largest of which is financial”.

Veterinarians often have their own money woes, too. Veterinary school is both extremely selective and extremely expensive, meaning vets also carry large debt loads relative to their earnings. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported in 2022 that the median annual wage of a veterinarian in the US was just more than $100,000 (£82,000). Yet American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) reports the average debt for recent veterinary graduates who needed loans to pay for their education is $179,505 (£147,250). 

“A lot of us are in unbelievable amounts of debt,” says Volk. “When I graduated in 2012, my personal student loan debt was at about $289,000. Despite a decade of payments, the total has increased because of interest, and right now it’s at $460,000.” Even if she wanted to stop being a veterinarian, she says she feels trapped: the sheer volume of sunk costs make transitioning to a new career feel close to impossible. 

“The math of being a veterinarian just does not work out,” she says. “There’s definitely a feeling that, no matter what you do, no matter how hard you work, you’re never getting out of that debt. And no matter how hard you work at your job, there’s so many people that come to you for help and you can’t help because of economic realities. You’re always going to be failing somebody.” 

‘Oh wow, you really don’t know what I do’

The work of a veterinarian is taxing, and the workload is made even heavier by a shortage of doctors. In the US, the American Animal Hospital Association reports a turnover rate near 25%, which means that, at any given time, one in four staff members are leaving their job. With just one applicant for every 10 open veterinary jobs, that leaves most clinics chronically understaffed.

“Caseloads are absolutely astronomical,” says Feliciano. “There are times when I’m working 80-plus hours a week. The doctors are overloaded, too: I’ve seen nights when a single doctor sees 20 or more cases in a 10-hour shift.”