Teaching suicide prevention: A Canadian medical education conundrum

Dilemmas and contradictions are ubiquitous in this human journey and often the source of humour. For example: “If I know one thing, it’s that I know nothing” and “I work best under pressure, but I hate being stressed!” There are also several contradictions in medical education that are not funny at all. I recently wrote that medical school curricula were not designed for long term retention.1 I’ve explained how we inadvertently or unwittingly promote and encourage among medical students sleep deprivation and self-medication.2 In 2007, I wrote about the perils of the hidden curriculum, which has not been tamed and still roams the halls and clinic spaces of medical schools.3 These and other dilemmas are not unique to Canadian medical education, but the tension around suicide prevention and offering Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) for patients with mental disorders certainly is. What are we educators to do when we find ourselves needing to teach about MAiD for mentally ill patients alongside suicide prevention and what we might consider for MAiD in general? Here we argue that medical educators ought to engage in an open discussion about how best to educate and form medical students and residents given a wide and vastly divergent range of reasonable opinions and perspectives found locally and internationally.