It was an anonymous article that exposed the medical profession's "shameful and disgusting open secret" that went viral.
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Yet for more than two years the identity of the junior doctor who penned the article - which sparked a closer look into the treatment of medical students - remained unknown.
Now, after finishing her training in a major Sydney Hospital, former Wollongong woman Sonia Henry has announced she was behind the article - and she's concerned that not much has changed.
Now in general practice in Sydney, Dr Henry - a former dux of St Mary's Star of the Sea College - has just released her debut novel. Going Under is a work of fiction, but it does give an insight into the world of a trainee female doctor.
It was written, in part, due to the feedback she received from the first article, which was published on social media site KevinMD in January 2017, and shared more than 22,000 times.
"I wanted to stay anonymous because I wanted people to pay attention to the issue rather than the author and sometimes being no one means you have more scope to speak for everyone," Dr Henry said.
"That it was shared so many times, thousands and thousands, worldwide, stunned me. And to see other doctors sharing it, saying 'this is how we feel' impacted upon me in a way I find difficult to describe.
"Even now, many doctors have written to me about my book despite it being out for only a week and in the end that's why I wrote it.
"If something I write or do can make one medical student or doctor for a second feel less isolated or alone then I will take any backlash I may face because it will have been worth it."
She said the words just flowed out of her, one night after a busy night shift. And they instantly resonated with many others in her profession.
"In the year it has taken me to finish my medical residency as a junior doctor, two of my colleagues have killed themselves," she wrote in the article.
In the year it has taken me to finish my medical residency as a junior doctor, two of my colleagues have killed themselves.
- Dr Sonia Henry
"I've read articles that refer to suicide amongst doctors as the profession's 'grubby little secret', but I'd rather call it exactly how it is: the profession's shameful and disgusting open secret."
The then medical student also talked about the "often brutalising culture" of training in the article, where junior doctors worked extremely long hours yet were too often used by senior staff as a "collective punching bag".
"There is something rotten inside the medical profession that has been festering for a long time with no realistic cure," she wrote.
"The statistics have spoken for themselves about doctor suicide and mental health for years, and yet our responses and solutions feel perfunctory at best and shameful at worst.
"...Junior doctors deserve better than what we are being given. It is time for the medical profession to look deep inside itself and fix the cancer that has been growing for far too long. If they don't the cost is simply too high."
Dr Henry said she maintained her strong links to the region through her parents, who live in Kiama. She also paid tribute to her English teachers at St Mary's, who she said had instilled in her "a sense of justice and also the power of words when used eloquently and truthfully".
But she said while some things had changed in the medical profession in the last couple of years, some had stayed the same.
"I think there have been positive interventions inside hospitals and I think doctors are now much more willing to have these discussions which is fantastic but I think there is scope for greater change, absolutely."
The most recent survey of junior doctors across NSW, the 2018 Hospital Health Check, revealed that around 42 per cent had experienced bullying, discrimination or harassment from another staff member. At Wollongong Hospital, the figure was 45 per cent.
Meantime junior doctors in NSW are currently being urged by their union to take legal action against the state government over excessive and unsafe amounts of unpaid overtime. The Australian Salaried Medical Officers Federation (ASMOF) is pursuing a class action on behalf of its doctors-in-training members.
And as to how much of Dr Henry's book, published by Allen & Unwin, is fiction?
"The book is fiction, but there are aspects of truth scattered throughout it," she said. "I don't think through the characters and their journey that anything that happens to them wouldn't have happened to some doctor throughout history through the course of their medical training.
"It is a novel, but it does speak to many, many truths."
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