For many young doctors fresh out of medical school, training years and internship period provide a crash course in depression. An analysis published on Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn has suggested that roughly one-third of interns and residents experience depressive symptoms or full-blown depression at some moment while their training is going on.

The figure is not just ironic if we consider that their profession exists to heal the ill, not the other way around, but is also unsafe for patients, as doctors with depression have more probability of providing poor care and make medical errors.

In an editorial, accompanying the study, Dr. Thomas S. Schwenk, dean of the University of Nevada School of Medicine, wrote, “The medical profession has a major problem. These findings could be easily construed as describing a depression endemic among residents and fellows”.

As per the study, signs of depression have been noticed in interns and residents worldwide and in all types of medical specialties. Schwenk wrote that though various diagnostic methods turned up conflicting levels of depressive symptoms, all of them have disclosed mental health issues with an ‘extraordinarily’ and ‘unacceptably high’ extent.

Study leader Dr. Douglas A. Mata, a resident in pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston along with his colleagues, analyzed data from 54 past researches that involved 17,560 physicians’ trainees. Some of the analyzed researches assessed new doctors at a particular point in time while others tracked them throughout up to 6 years of training, internship and residency.