This Mental Health Awareness Month, clinicians are being reminded that mental well-being is not just a personal issue — it’s a workforce crisis. New research shows that burnout, chronic stress, and emotional exhaustion are driving doctors out of medicine at younger ages, underscoring the need for stronger mental health support and workplace reforms.
The reasons driving doctors to quit medicine have shifted in recent years, a new study says.
Doctors now cite burnout, chronic workplace stress, the burden of red tape, and unrealistic patient expectations as the top reasons why they leave clinical practice early, researchers reported May 7 in The Permanente Journal.
That’s a change from the late 2000s, when doctors were more likely to quit due to personal health problems, rising malpractice insurance premiums, a perception of hassle, and a lack of professional satisfaction, researchers said.
“We hope that by better understanding what drove these physicians away from the clinical practice of medicine, we might uncover meaningful insights that will help us improve physician professional satisfaction and retention,” lead researcher Dr. Sea Chen said in a news release.
Chen is a radiation oncologist and physician director of practice sustainability with the American Medical Association.
For the new study, researchers surveyed 971 clinically inactive doctors across all specialties who completed their residencies between 2000 and 2022.
Results showed that doctors these days are quitting at an earlier age. The average age of physicians leaving medicine was 48, about nine years younger than docs surveyed in 2008.
All told, the reasons doctors leave medicine these days “align with the components of burnout, which can be defined as the prolonged response to chronic workplace stressors and consist of emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and lack of personal accomplishment,” researchers wrote in their paper.
There also appears to be a gender gap when it comes to leaving the profession early.
Two-thirds of the doctors surveyed (64 percent) after they left medicine were women, and results showed that female doctors were more likely to than men to exit the workforce to care for young children and other family members, for health concerns, and for stress.
“The women in our study left clinical practice earlier than men, and they left due to pressures like caring for young children or other family members more often than men,” Chen said. “Addressing these issues — through better childcare access, flexible work policies, and equitable treatment — could help retain more women in the physician workforce.”
These results indicate that healthcare systems need to shift strategies if they want to retain doctors, researchers said.
“As the healthcare system works to further expand the physician pipeline by opening new medical schools and adding more residency slots, it’s worth asking whether we should also focus on supporting physicians who are already trained,” Chen said.
More information
Johns Hopkins University has more about the physician shortage in America.
SOURCES: The Permanente Federation, news release, May 7, 2026; The Permanente Journal, May 7, 2026
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