The mental health of the nursing workforce is one of the least measured variables in the entire operation, and when researchers do measure it, the picture is sobering.

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What the peer-reviewed research shows

Two studies published in the JAMA family of journals have moved nurse mental health from anecdote to evidence.

In 2023, a team led by Mark Olfson at Columbia University published the first large-scale analysis of suicide risk across the U.S. healthcare workforce in JAMA.

Tracking a nationally representative cohort, they found that nurses have a 64 percent higher risk for suicide than the general working population.

Another study led by Matthew Davis at the University of Michigan, published in JAMA Psychiatry, sharpened the finding by sex. Female nurses died by suicide at roughly twice the rate of women in the general population, and at a rate 70 percent higher than female physicians.

This was pre-pandemic data that captured the baseline, not the surge. Simply put, the largest clinical workforce in the country has been carrying an elevated suicide risk that most of the institutions employing them never quantified.

The researcher who first established this pattern at national scale is joining our live panel coming up on Sept 8th, 2026. Judy Davidson, a nurse scientist at UC San Diego, led the first national longitudinal study of nurse suicide in the United States, drawing on the CDC's National Violent Death Reporting System to confirm elevated risk across both male and female nurses. She also co-chairs the American Nurses Association task force created to address it. When she talks about this problem, she is describing work she has spent more than a decade on.

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Why it stayed invisible for so long

Part of the answer is cultural. Nursing is built around absorbing strain on behalf of other people. The professional identity is caregiving, which makes needing care feel like a failure of the role itself. A workforce trained to be the steady one in every crisis does not readily raise its hand and say it is struggling.

That silence is often read by leadership as an absence of a problem. It is not. It is the problem, operating exactly as designed.

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The barrier most leaders don't know about

There is a structural reason the silence persists, and it is one most executives have never had reason to learn.

For years, many state licensing boards and hospital credentialing applications asked nurses broad questions about their mental health history, including whether they had ever received treatment. For a nurse weighing whether to seek help, that question changes the math. Getting support is no longer just a personal decision, it becomes something that might surface at the next license renewal or credentialing review, with their career attached to the answer. When help-seeking carries a perceived professional cost, people avoid it.

National reform efforts have pushed to remove these intrusive questions and replace them with language focused on current impairment rather than past treatment, and progress has been real, but the chilling effect built over decades does not disappear the moment a form changes. Many nurses still assume the safest move is to say nothing.

This single fact explains a great deal of what looks, from the outside, like a workforce that simply does not ask for help.

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What the research says is changeable

Here is the part that matters most for anyone in a position to act.

The literature increasingly locates the risk in organizational and structural conditions, not in fixed traits of the people who become nurses. Workload, autonomy, scheduling, access to confidential care, and the disclosure barriers described above are all things institutions control. That reframes the entire question. This is not a workforce that needs to be more resilient. It is a set of conditions that can be redesigned.

Which means the numbers above are not a verdict. They are a starting point.

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A model that already works

Davidson did not stop at documenting the problem. At UC San Diego she built and tested the first suicide prevention program designed specifically for the healthcare workforce: the Healer Education, Assessment and Referral program, known as HEAR. Running since 2009, it uses proactive, confidential screening to reach clinicians who are struggling and connect them to care, deliberately routing around the disclosure fears that keep nurses silent. The program makes the first move, so an at-risk nurse does not have to.

HEAR has been recognized as a best practice by both the American Nurses Association and the American Medical Association, and it was built to be replicated. That matters, because it settles the question this article opened with. The conditions driving the risk are not fixed. There is a working model, tested over more than a decade, that proves an organization can act.

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Join the conversation on September 8

On September 8, CCA is hosting a live panel with three doctoral-level nurse leaders who have spent their careers focused onthis problem. They will walk through what the research shows, what the reality looks like from inside the profession, and what it takes to move an organization from awareness to action.

It is a free, one hour event, designed for the people who can actually change the conditions: nursing and clinical leaders, HR and total rewards teams, and the benefits advisors who support them.

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