Here’s a compelling obvservation about our culture’s stigma with mental health.

A new study reveals that doctors-in-training may face a higher risk for depression and suicide than the general public does.

Many of them suffer in silence rather than show weakness in the face of extraordinary pressures new doctors must endure, according to the study, which was published recently in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

In their review of data from existing studies, researchers discovered depression among medical students and resident physicians was significantly higher than the rates found in the general population.

Their data came from 54 studies published in peer-reviewed journals between January 1963 and September 2015, which included 17,560 doctors-in-training.

The findings:

• About 29 percent of these early physicians go through bouts of clinical depression during their residency, much higher than the roughly 6.7 percent of Americans who experience depression annually reported by the National Institute of Mental Health.

• 43 percent of resident physicians tend to get depressed in any one year of their training.

• The trend appears to have worsened since the early 1960s, according to Douglas A. Mata, M.D., a resident physician in pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School. He says it’s an “open secret” that depression is rampant among resident physicians.

“Ask anyone in medicine,” Mata said in an interview with Yahoo Health, “and they’ll be able to rattle off a list of colleagues who have been through depression.”

By itself this is a startling and disturbing revelation. But it’s far more worrisome that many young physicians learn through their own experience to just “suck it up” and conceal any emotional strife. Since depression can carry stigma, they avoid seeking treatment for their symptoms. It’s a natural reaction in their career habitat — a pressure cooker intended to get doctors to deal with the pressure of making life-or-death decisions when there’s no time to think.

The problem is that the attitude may have spilled over into their practices to the extent that many doctors might encourage their patients to deal with mental illness they way they were trained to deal with it. In addition, untreated depression often runs side-by-side with other medical conditions, especially stroke and heart attack when it develops in early adulthood. Depression has been linked to an increase in medical errors. Fatigue from lack of sleep, a prominent symptom of depression, exacerbates the risk of medical errors as well.

Plenty has been said about the warning signs of depression and how it leads to more severe mental illness. The discussion is healthy and necessary. Our stress-laden, sleep-deprived society simply needs to shed the stigma of mental health.

But we should add to this discussion the possibility that some physicians who refuse the best medical advice are reluctant to dispense it. Shed some light on this subject and ensure the public that our medical field is practicing what it needs to preach.