Who looks after the vet?

The numbers

Veterinary mental health: a profession under measurable strain

The most-cited figure comes from the United States. Researchers at the CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health examined the records of 11,620 veterinarians who died between 1979 and 2015 and found that female veterinarians were 3.5 times, and male veterinarians 2.1 times, as likely as the general population to die by suicide (CDC, on Tomasi et al., JAVMA 2019).

Studies of living veterinarians point the same way. The Merck Animal Health wellbeing study of 2,871 randomly sampled US veterinarians found that 7.5% had experienced suicidal ideation in the previous twelve months, against about 4% of the general population, and that 6.4% were in serious psychological distress.

Europe’s picture is less complete but consistent. A 2025 study of 724 veterinarians in seven European countries found that 24.4% reported a diagnosed mental illness and 22% were taking medication for mental health; half (50.3%) worked more than 40 hours a week. In a 2026 Spanish study of 216 veterinarians, 61.1% scored high or very high for emotional exhaustion. A January 2026 survey of 654 veterinarians in France, Italy and Portugal, reported by Economistul.ro, found that 76% struggled to manage the emotional demands of the job.

Romania is the gap. That same survey added ten in-depth interviews with experienced Romanian veterinarians, but we could not find a large, published, Romania-specific prevalence study. We will not invent a number to fill that gap. Nobody has measured it properly yet — and someone should.

Pressure no. 1

Moral distress and compassion fatigue: the emotional work nobody bills for

Euthanasia decisions, grieving owners, and animals that could be saved if money were not the deciding factor. Researchers call the last one moral distress: knowing the right course of action and being unable to take it.

The first large study of it in veterinary medicine surveyed 889 North American veterinarians. Seventy-nine percent said they had been asked to provide care they considered futile. More than 70% said the obstacles that stopped them giving appropriate care caused them or their staff moderate to severe distress, and almost two-thirds said the same about euthanasia requests they considered inappropriate.

Human medicine has a partial buffer here: a system that pays, a hospital ethics committee, colleagues down the corridor. A veterinarian in a two-person clinic often has none of these. The decision is made in the consulting room, and so is the reckoning afterwards. Compassion fatigue — the gradual wearing-down that comes from constant exposure to suffering — builds up in exactly that quiet space.

No software fixes this. It belongs to colleagues, supervisors, professional bodies and, when needed, professional help.

Pressure no. 2

The client, in the room and online

In the European study above, one of the most strongly endorsed stressors was neither euthanasia nor the hours. It was owners expecting an immediate diagnosis. Owners arrive having already consulted a search engine, a forum and, increasingly, a chatbot. They have a diagnosis in mind and want it confirmed, fast and cheaply.

When the conversation goes badly, it no longer stays in the consulting room. In the US wellbeing study, 12% of veterinarians said they had been cyberbullied within the previous twelve months (13% of women), and about as many again at some earlier point. A single furious review, written at midnight by someone whose animal has just died, can follow a small clinic for years — and the veterinarian usually cannot reply without breaching confidentiality.

Much of this friction comes from a gap in trust: the owner is weighing what the veterinarian says against what the internet said. Every minute spent arguing with a forum post is a minute taken from the animal, and from the clinician’s own patience.

Pressure no. 3

The paperwork after the patients

In a 2024–25 survey by the Federation of Veterinarians of Europe, 64% of respondents said their administrative workload had doubled in recent years, and none reported a decrease. Prescribing and dispensing were the heaviest task — 14% put it at more than 10 hours a week — and 60% said more than half of their administrative work was unpaid. One caveat: the sample was small (75 veterinarians, self-selected), so these figures are an indication, not a census.

Administration is draining in a particular way. It is not the sort of hard work that feels meaningful. It is work that pushes meaningful work out, and it is done after hours, when recovery should be happening.

Pressure no. 4

The dose that has to be right, tired

A 2024 review of medication errors in veterinary anaesthesia lists the usual human factors — distraction, fatigue, workload — alongside risks specific to veterinary work: calculating doses from body mass, giving several drugs in a short window, and preparing syringes in advance. In the data it reviewed, errors in cats were more often associated with harm than errors in dogs.

A 2025 study of third-year veterinary students calculating 686 perianaesthetic doses found an error rate of 1.8% per calculation; of those errors, 83% would have resulted in an overdose. Those are students, not practising veterinarians — but the direction of the error is the telling part: when the arithmetic goes wrong, it tends to go wrong towards too much.

Species make this harder. Donkeys are not small horses: a review of donkey pharmacology notes differences from horses in drug distribution, metabolism and elimination for most of the agents studied — enough that a borrowed equine dose can be ineffective or toxic. Cats are not small dogs either.

Now combine the pressures. The dose is calculated at the end of a long shift, after a difficult euthanasia, with a queue waiting. The weak point is not knowledge. It is working memory under load.

Pressure no. 5

Food animals, withdrawal periods, and a second patient you never meet

For veterinarians who treat cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry or bees, every prescription has a second patient: the person who will eventually drink the milk, eat the meat or the eggs, or buy the honey. Withdrawal periods are what protect that person, and getting them wrong has consequences that reach well beyond the farm.

The arithmetic is not always simple. When a medicine is used outside the terms of its authorisation — the “cascade” — Article 115 of Regulation (EU) 2019/6 requires the veterinarian to set the withdrawal period. For meat and offal the minimum is the longest period in the summary of product characteristics multiplied by 1.5, or 28 days where the product is not authorised for food-producing animals. Milk uses the same factor, or seven days where the product is not authorised for milk-producing animals; eggs use the same factor, or ten days where it is not authorised for egg-laying animals. For bees the Regulation gives no fixed figure: the period is set case by case, weighing the risk of residues in honey.

This is work done in a cold barn, often alone, on a phone, with a farmer waiting and a herd behind him. It is the same working-memory problem as the anaesthetic dose — except that the error surfaces weeks later, in a food chain.

Pressure no. 6

The first ten years

The burden is not spread evenly. In the US wellbeing study, 13.2% of veterinarians aged 18–34 were in serious psychological distress, compared with 1.7% of those aged 65 and over; overall, 52% said they would not recommend the profession. In the Spanish study, emotional exhaustion, depression and stress scores peaked in the 30–39 age group.

Some of this is what one would expect: early-career veterinarians have less clinical confidence, less control over their schedules and, in many countries, more debt. But there is a quieter factor any recent graduate will recognise — being the only veterinarian in the building for the first time, with a decision to make and nobody to ask. Uncertainty handled alone is one of the most corrosive experiences a young clinician can have, and also one of the easiest to reduce.

What helps

What the evidence points to

The honest answer is that the strongest levers are not individual ones. Staffing, realistic appointment lengths, fair pay, protected time off and a practice culture where it is normal to ask for a second opinion matter more than any app, breathing exercise or wellness webinar.

Some findings do point to specific, fixable gaps. In the North American moral-distress study, 71% of veterinarians had received no training in conflict resolution and 79% none in self-care; the authors call for exactly that training, and for institutional ethics support. They also observe that the relative lack of standardised care guidelines in veterinary medicine may increase the burden of relying on personal judgment. Professional bodies have started building structures to match: the UK’s RCVS Mind Matters Initiative, for example, points veterinarians to Vetlife’s round-the-clock confidential support and to VetSupport, a peer network offering longer-term coaching.

That observation — fewer decisions carried on personal judgment alone — is where we think tools belong. They do not fix the culture. Their job is to make sure that when a veterinarian has to decide something alone, the published evidence is one click away and clearly labelled.

The honest part

What a veterinary reference tool can and cannot do

Most of what harms veterinary wellbeing is structural, and Lares Pecoris fixes none of it. Any product that claims to fix burnout is selling something.

What it can do is remove one specific kind of strain: the moment of uncertainty in which a piece of information has to be found, checked and trusted quickly, alone. That moment happens dozens of times a week, and it adds up.

Checked, not trusted. Lares answers only from a closed, curated corpus — more than 2,300 named sources as of 4 October 2026, including international guidelines such as WSAVA, ESCCAP, AAHA and AAEP, veterinary legislation and official product information. Every answer arrives with the document it came from, which you can open. You are not asked to trust the tool, only to read the page it points to.

The calculation, taken off your working memory. The dosage calculator takes species, weight and product and returns the dose with the product-sheet warnings and the withdrawal periods for milk, meat and eggs, plus herd and apiary totals. Donkeys and mules are listed as their own species, as are cats and dogs. You still check the result — but the arithmetic is no longer happening in your head at the end of the day.

Silence instead of guesswork. If a question is not supported by the corpus, Lares says so plainly. It will not invent a dose or an interaction. At 20:00, an honest “I don’t have that” is worth more than a fluent answer that would need double-checking anyway, because it tells you exactly when to phone a colleague or open the product sheet.

This matters more now that general-purpose AI chatbots are everywhere. They are fluent, fast and often right — and when they are wrong, they are wrong in exactly the same confident tone. For a tired clinician, a tool that is sometimes wrong and never says so adds to the mental load, because every answer has to be checked from scratch. What reduces the load is knowing which answers are grounded and which are not (more in Informed, not invented).

Lares is not a veterinarian and does not diagnose. It is not a medical device. It reports what the official documents say, and the decision remains yours.

In practice

Three moments from a shift

To make this concrete, here are three moments from an illustrative working day. They are not case reports — just the kinds of situations veterinarians describe.

14:10, the cat on the table. The owner mentions she has been giving the cat “a bit of the dog’s flea treatment”. You need to know, quickly, what the product literature says about that product in cats. Instead of searching and hoping the first result is current, you ask in plain language and get the answer with the product sheet attached, open on the screen. The owner can read it too. The conversation changes from “the vet says” to “the label says” — a much easier conversation to have.

17:30, the dairy herd. A cow needs treatment. You enter species, weight and product, and the calculator returns the dose, the warnings and the withdrawal periods for milk and meat as the product sheet states them, with the source. If the product falls outside what the corpus supports, it says so instead of guessing. You still make the call. You just are not reconstructing a product sheet from memory in a barn.

19:40, the man with the phone. He has read that his cat’s condition should have been handled differently. You cannot give him back the lost time, but you can show him the guideline you followed, with its source, edition and section. Some people will stay angry anyway. Many will not — and every conversation that ends in understanding rather than a one-star review is some weight taken off the job.

None of these moments is dramatic. That is the point. Burnout rarely comes from one big event. It comes from hundreds of small ones, and some of the small ones can be made smaller.

If this is you

You are allowed to ask for help too

If you are a veterinarian reading this and the first sections felt a little too familiar, talk to someone: a colleague, your GP, a psychologist. Needing support is not a failing in a profession whose everyday work includes other people’s worst days.

If you run a practice, the most useful thing you can do this month is probably not a wellness initiative. It is a norm: that anyone, at any seniority, can say “I’m not sure, can you look at this with me?” without it counting against them.

Questions

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Tomasi SE, Fechter-Leggett ED, Edwards NT, et al. Suicide among veterinarians in the United States from 1979 through 2015. JAVMA 2019;254(1):104–112. CDC press release.
2. Merck Animal Health. Veterinarian Wellbeing Study 2020, January 2020 (n = 2,871 US veterinarians; fieldwork 30 Sep – 23 Oct 2019).
3. Máté M, Várnai CH, Ózsvári L. A cross-national study on mental health, psychological distress and suicidal ideation among veterinarians in multiple European countries. Frontiers in Veterinary Science 2025;12:1634139. doi:10.3389/fvets.2025.1634139.
4. Guntín S, López-Roel S, Isorna M, Fariña F. Mental health in Spanish veterinarians: emotional exhaustion, affective symptomatology, and suicidal ideation. Eur J Investig Health Psychol Educ 2026;16(4):49. PMC13115369.
5. Purina PRO PLAN / Censuswide, survey of 654 veterinarians (FR, IT, PT), 14–19 January 2026, with 10 in-depth interviews in Romania. Reported by Economistul.ro, 25 May 2026.
6. Moses L, Malowney MJ, Boyd JW. Ethical conflict and moral distress in veterinary practice: a survey of North American veterinarians. J Vet Intern Med 2018;32(6):2115–2122. doi:10.1111/jvim.15315.
7. Federation of Veterinarians of Europe. Understanding the growing administrative burden in veterinary practice (survey 5 Aug 2024 – 15 Jan 2025, n = 75).
8. Pinho RH, Nasr-Esfahani M, Pang DSJ. Medication errors in veterinary anesthesia: a literature review. Veterinary Anaesthesia and Analgesia 2024;51(3):203–226. PubMed 38570267.
9. Pinho RH, Robinson AR, Pang J, Pang DSJ. Perianesthetic dose calculation errors by veterinary students during a live animal teaching laboratory. J Vet Med Educ 2025:e20250037. PubMed 40587234.
10. Grosenbaugh DA, Reinemeyer CR, Figueiredo MD. Pharmacology and therapeutics in donkeys. Equine Veterinary Education 2011;23(10):523–530. doi:10.1111/j.2042-3292.2011.00291.x.
11. Regulation (EU) 2019/6 on veterinary medicinal products, Article 115. EUR-Lex; text of Article 115 as adopted.
12. Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons, Mind Matters Initiative. Mind Matters – Vetlife and VetSupport.
13. Alianța Română de Prevenție a Suicidului, antisuicid.ro/contact; Magyar Lelki Elsősegély Telefonszolgálatok Szövetsége (LESZ), sos116-123.hu.

All sources accessed 4 October 2026.