← all questions · Burnout and leaving
Get a GP who is not a colleague, get leave booked, and call someone tonight if you need to. Drs4Drs is free, confidential, 24/7 on 1300 374 377 with a service in every state 1; Lifeline is 13 11 14 2. Since March 2020 a treating doctor only has to notify Ahpra at a substantial risk of harm 3.
First: the reporting fear is mostly wrong. The single biggest reason doctors do not get treatment is worry about mandatory notification. Since 1 March 2020 the threshold for a treating practitioner to notify has been raised to a substantial risk of harm to the public — Ahpra's own description is that this "is a very high threshold and is not common", and the change was made specifically so practitioners feel safe seeking treatment 3. The amendments apply everywhere except Western Australia 3. Having a mental health care plan is not a notifiable event.
Who to call. Drs4Drs: free, confidential, independent, 24/7 nationally on 1300 374 377, with a service in every state and territory — NSW 02 9437 6552, VIC 1300 330 543, QLD 07 3833 4352, WA 08 6388 4904, SA and NT 08 8366 0250, ACT and TAS on the national number 1. Lifeline 13 11 14 for right now 2.
You are not unusual. The beyondblue national survey of 11,252 doctors and 1,811 students found about a quarter of doctors were highly likely to have a minor psychiatric disorder and 10.4% reported suicidal thoughts in the previous 12 months, against roughly 1 in 45 in the general community; young doctors and rural doctors were among the higher-risk groups 5.
Do the boring things in order. A GP who is not a colleague and not in your hospital, a mental health care plan, and leave actually booked — not "after this term". If rostering is refusing leave, that is an industrial question and your union handles it 4. The recurring warning in the threads is that recovery takes longer than people expect, so a long weekend is not a plan.
Do not make the big decision now. Almost every account from people who came out the other side says the same thing: sort the sleep and the support first, decide about medicine second. What looks like "I must leave medicine" often turns out to be "I must leave this roster" 6.
r/ausjdocs — community view, not policy; verbatim, cautionary beside positive where both exist, every quote linked to the comment.
It took a lot longer to recover from the burnout than I expected
book some leave and get thee to a comf hotel bed
For residents, overworked uncredited trainees with no clear path or timing for when/if they get on training. The uncertainty makes things 1000x worse.
See your GP for a mental health plan and book a psychologist ASAP. You do sound burnt out and, having been there, your mind currently may make decisions you later regret
When you're posting about whether you have burnout in reddit
Asked 56 times on r/ausjdocs (title-regex count) · encoded by hand from the numbered sources, retrieved 12 Sept 2026; no AI wrote any of it. how the count was made
asked_count = posts in r_ausjdocs_posts.jsonl (19,145 posts, 2022-09-13 to 2026-09-12) whose title matches /burn(t|ed)? ?out|burnout/i. Quotes are the highest-scoring comments in the burnout threads that give an action rather than a diagnosis, kept balanced between the two people who recovered and the two who describe how long it took and why the unaccredited years make it worse.