Surviving a Physician Suicide: Imperfect Grief and Shaping the Narrative for the Children Left Behind (part 1 of 3 with Janae Sharp)

In Part 1 of our 3-part interview with Janae Sharp—a physician suicide loss survivor and the Founder and CEO of the Sharp Index, a nonprofit dedicated to better physician mental health—Janae shares her story of loss, grief, and her call to action to start her non-profit.
She discusses how suicide loss is different from other losses, in part because it is a "messy topic," but also how grief itself is imperfect. She details the experience of telling her 3 children and why she feels compelled to create "better memories" for them. She constantly reinforces the power and complexity of humanity.
​Janae is always looking for collaborators (she wants more psychiatrists!) and donors, so if you are interested in getting involved contact her at [email protected]. For additional information or to learn more about Janae’s work for physicians, survivors, and families please visit the following websites: Mdsuicide.com and Sharpindex.org. Find her on Twitter @CoherenceMed.
TRANSCRIPT:
David Carreon: This is David Carreon.
Jessi Gold: This is Jessi Gold.
David Carreon: And this is Psyched!, a psychiatry podcast. Today we have Janae Sharp. Janae is a physician suicide loss survivor and the founder and CEO of the Sharp Index, a non-profit dedicated to better physician mental health.
Her main work involves health care data and analytics marketing to improve health care outcomes for the underserved. Python is her preferred code language, but her true passion is match making companies to create elegant health IT systems and to improve health.
She's worked with interoperability and social determinants of health and is an expert on patient and physician engagement. Janae has 3 children, enjoys hiking, triathlon and quilting. Janae, thank you for joining us.
Janae Sharp: Thank you. I hate writing bios as well. I feel like that's important.
Jessi Gold: Yeah, it is really important.
David Carreon: We should have added that to your bio.
Janae Sharp: Yeah.
Jessi Gold: And writing a bio was not your favorite thing to have done.
Janae Sharp: Hearing my own bio I'm always like, "That's a terrible bio. Someone should rewrite that. That poor lady."
Jessi Gold: Well, okay, so how about we start with you just telling us more about you and your story and then as much as you feel like telling us, yeah.
Janae Sharp: Oh, well, that could be pretty long, but so the story of starting the Sharp Index, I can talk about. Like it says, I have a background in health care IT, and I've worked with people creating data products and worked in social media a lot, and I am also a physician suicide loss survivor.
My former spouse, John Madsen, was a physician. He died by suicide, and we created the index actually in his memory and through my experiences with his death. We have 3 children, and I've been able to share a lot of our story and trying to create good memories and, really, how that type of loss was pretty different in terms of the support that my kids got.
It was really frustrating. I felt like people didn't really know what to say or had a lot of advice that wasn't helpful or advice that really was hurtful in some ways. And we wanted to create something that brought awareness to physician suicide but also addressed that, created a better place, and that's really our hope, to have better memories for people.
But also, the index is focused on reducing burnout. So you can look at scores and information about your burnout risk or reasons for that or mental health. And we want to create a network of peer support that's outside of your employer because when ... physicians are really driven to succeed and to accomplish a lot, and that doesn't always ... You don't always want to tell your employer you're really struggling.
And in addition, people aren't always aware. If you've always been really in a work environment where you have a lot of stress and you've been a higher achiever, you aren't always aware and in touch with things that might put you at risk.
So that's been kind of my personal story is just that we had just kind of this impossible situation, and I wanted ... And when people would ask me, “What should you do? What are solutions?” I didn't feel like there was a lot out there that was focused on a realistic approach and not just doing lip service to the topic, especially since I was a family member and didn't ha...