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Research summaryPhysiciansJune 20264 min read

Physician burnout fell from its peak: it still sits in the forties

Physician burnout is lower than it was during the pandemic, and that is real progress. But every national source still puts it at roughly four in ten doctors a year. Martha's national report pulls those sources together to show where the strain sits and what it costs.

National report built on published data: Mayo Clinic Proceedings, AMA and Medscape surveys and peer-reviewed studies, 2015 to 2026

A plain-language summary of State of Physician Wellbeing, a white paper by Martha Fernandez, LCSW, published on cerevity.com by CEREVITY, the private-pay therapy network she co-founded. The full paper includes the methods and every reference.

Better than the peak is not the same as low

A national survey series run with similar methods since 2011 found 62.8 percent of US physicians with at least one burnout symptom in 2021. By 2023 that was 45.2 percent. The AMA's survey of nearly 19,000 responses put 2025 at 41.9 percent, and Medscape's separate 2025 report found 47 percent. The sources use different methods, so the report reads them as a range. The range has not left the forties.

The report leans on the National Academies (2019), which concluded that burnout is a systems problem rooted in how health care is organized, not a lack of personal toughness. The strain starts early: a JAMA meta-analysis of 54 studies (Mata et al., 2015) found depression or depressive symptoms in 28.8 percent of resident physicians. In Medscape’s 2024 report, about one in five physicians said they were depressed.

What the national data shows

• It is not spread evenly. Emergency medicine, urological surgery and hematology-oncology all reported close to 50 percent in 2025. Psychiatry was 31.6 percent.
• It reaches patients. In a study of 6,586 physicians, those with burnout had about 2.2 times the odds of reporting a major medical error.
• It is expensive. A 2019 analysis put the national cost at 4.6 billion dollars a year, about 7,600 dollars per employed physician, mostly through turnover and cut hours.
• The gravest cost falls unevenly. A 2025 JAMA Psychiatry analysis found female physicians’ suicide risk 53 percent higher than other women’s between 2017 and 2021.

What removes it

The report asks for two things at once. Health systems need to cut documentation load and drop intrusive mental health questions from licensing and credentialing forms, and as of September 2026, 46 licensure boards and more than 4,300 hospitals and facilities had done so. Individual doctors need care they trust to stay private, before strain shows up in their work. The report spells that out: no shared record, no insurance code that could reach credentialing, and a clinician who understands medicine. Private pay, no claim and nothing in hospital systems meets that standard.

For physicians in Southern California, see therapy in Los Angeles or San Diego.

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Full white paperState of Physician WellbeingMartha Fernandez, LCSW · 4,659 words · 18 referencesRead the original

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