03/10/2026
There is a phrase in veterinary medicine that I wish never needed to exist:
Not One More Vet.
It sounds like a slogan until you understand what the “one more” means.
One more veterinarian lost to su***de.
And unfortunately, veterinary medicine doesn't just have a vague “this is a stressful profession” problem. It has a su***de problem. An actual, measurable, studied one. A CDC study looking at U.S. veterinarians who died between 1979 and 2015 found that male veterinarians were 2.1 times and female veterinarians 3.5 times as likely as the general U.S. population to die by su***de. Another large survey found serious psychological distress, depression, and suicidal thoughts at disturbing levels within the profession.
There isn't one neat little reason for that. It would almost be easier if there were. Veterinary school is difficult. The debt can be enormous. The hours can be ridiculous. There are staffing shortages, compassion fatigue, burnout, euthanasia, emergencies, difficult cases, financial conversations with owners, and the emotional whiplash of desperately trying to save one animal, helping another die peacefully, and then walking into the next appointment where somebody needs you to smile, think clearly, make another medical decision, and keep moving.
And then there are the expectations.
Because the number of posts I see from veterinarians who apparently feel like they need to publicly explain why they cannot personally be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year is...ouch.
Especially when we're talking about rural veterinarians and small practices.
Sometimes the “clinic” people are furious with isn't some giant veterinary hospital with twenty doctors rotating through shifts while three more are sitting in the break room waiting for something interesting to happen. Sometimes there is one veterinarian.
Maybe two.
That's it.
And apparently there is occasionally some confusion about the fact that the veterinarian who worked all day Monday is the exact same veterinarian who exists Monday night. There isn't another one stored in a cabinet somewhere that they pull out after business hours. If that veterinarian answers emergency calls all night, they don't regenerate at sunrise like some kind of medically trained farm-country vampire. Tuesday still arrives. The scheduled appointments are still there. The surgeries are still there. The herd checks are still there. The sick animals are still sick. The phone still rings. The prescriptions still need to be filled. The records still need to be written. And eventually Tuesday night arrives and somebody else's cow decides this would be an excellent opportunity to develop a problem nobody has seen since a veterinary textbook published in 1977.
At some point, the veterinarian has to sleep.
They have to eat.
They have families. They get sick. They have birthdays, holidays, weddings and funerals. Occasionally they may even want to sit on their own couch for an entire evening without hearing a phone ring and immediately wondering what species has chosen violence this time.
And yes, emergencies happen. Animals are spectacularly unconcerned with business hours. They do not recognize weekends, Christmas, anniversaries, vacations or the little sign on the clinic door saying CLOSED. A cow can spend 364 days behaving like a perfectly functional bovine and then decide Christmas morning at 3:19 would be a lovely time to become medically fascinating.
But an emergency existing does not create another veterinarian.
That's the part that seems to get lost.
If a one-veterinarian practice is expected to provide emergency coverage 24/7, who is on call for the veterinarian?
Because “on call” is not actually time off. You can't completely relax. You can't necessarily leave town. You can't shut your phone off. You can't sleep without knowing that at any moment you may have to get dressed, drive somewhere in the dark, examine an animal, make medical decisions while somebody is scared and stressed, possibly perform a procedure, drive home, sleep for whatever portion of the night remains and then show up for the appointments already scheduled the next morning.
Do that occasionally and it's exhausting.
Do it repeatedly and apparently we're surprised when people burn out.
Then when a veterinarian finally says, “I can't keep doing this,” or a clinic announces that it can no longer provide emergency coverage every night of the year, sometimes the response isn't, “Wow. They must have been stretched pretty thin.”
It's anger.
People complain that nobody answered. They leave nasty reviews. They accuse veterinarians of not caring about animals. They say they only care about money. They ask why someone would become a veterinarian if they weren't willing to help an animal whenever it needed help.
Which is a fascinating argument when you think about it.
We accuse veterinarians of only caring about money while simultaneously expecting them to care about animals so much that they surrender unlimited amounts of their sleep, evenings, weekends, holidays and family time for the rest of their careers.
Pick one.
They signed up to practice veterinary medicine.
They did not sign up to stop being human.
And rural veterinary medicine makes this even harder because there already aren't enough veterinarians in many areas, particularly veterinarians willing to do food-animal and large-animal work. So when one veterinarian cuts back emergency hours because they cannot sustain them anymore, people get angry because access becomes harder. When another burns out and leaves large-animal practice completely, access becomes even harder. Then the remaining veterinarians inherit more clients, more emergencies and more pressure until eventually one of them says they can't keep doing it either.
This is perhaps not the brilliant long-term workforce strategy we seem to think it is.
And it isn't only the dramatic middle-of-the-night emergencies. It's all the little things.
One phone call.
One text.
One “quick question.”
One picture with, “Does this look normal?”
One person asking whether they can just quickly run something past the veterinarian.
Individually, none of those things seems unreasonable. Most probably aren't. But if twenty people each need five minutes, that isn't five minutes anymore.
That's another hour and forty minutes of somebody's day.
And that is before the emergencies, appointments, surgeries, records and everything else that was already supposed to fit into it.
That's why Not One More Vet matters.
The organization grew out of tragedy and has become part of a much larger conversation about mental health in veterinary medicine. But I don't think this conversation can stay inside veterinary medicine, because the rest of us are part of the environment veterinarians are trying to survive in.
We cannot say veterinary mental health matters and then become furious when veterinarians establish boundaries.
We cannot post Not One More Vet after another veterinarian dies and then leave a one-star review because the veterinarian wouldn't answer the phone at midnight.
We cannot say, “Please take care of yourself,” and then become offended when taking care of themselves occasionally means they aren't available to us.
Sometimes supporting veterinary medicine looks like being incredibly grateful for the veterinarian who comes out at 2 a.m.
Sometimes it looks like understanding why they can't.
Sometimes it means recognizing that the emergency clinic is farther away and inconvenient and expensive and that none of those things magically creates another veterinarian in the local clinic.
Sometimes it means realizing the person who didn't answer your emergency tonight may have answered somebody else's last night.
And sometimes it means remembering that the person wearing the stethoscope is a person before they are a veterinarian.
Because su***de prevention cannot just mean telling exhausted people to be more resilient.
At some point, the people around them have to stop demanding that resilience be infinite.
Not One More Vet shouldn't only be something the veterinary profession says to itself after another tragedy.
The rest of us need to hear it too.
Because the animals matter.
The clients matter.
But the person trying to take care of all of them matters too.
Not one more.
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