Dr. Adam Hill MD | From Alcoholic to Author & Advocate for Depression & Addiction in the Medical Community

<p>Dr. Adam Hill grew up on a small Indiana farm, with hardworking parents, his father was a counselor that worked with students with mental health issues. Adam saw this at a young age and credits this as influencing his professional arc to eventually join the medical field. His childhood had lots of bullying, with mental and physical abuse that he didn’t start dealing with until his late 20’s. He was an all-state tennis player, ran track & did very well in school. But on the inside, he was very fragile and broken. He started drinking at the age of 14, and enjoyed the numbing of his pain and fitting in with society. He noticed that while his friends were having a couple of beers, he would finish off a whole case. He didn’t realize how bad it was getting until medical school. Even in medical school, binge drinking was very popular. During his medical school at Duke & Butler Universities, he started to experience the high pressure & stressful environment that came with his profession, and it started to take its toll on his physical and mental health. Depression became a major part of his life, with sleep deprivation and anxiety making it worse. During his residency, is when he really started to notice. This led to depression in his case, and eventually to a more developed form of alcoholism. When he started his residency & practice as a doctor, his drinking really got worse. He started drinking every day. He would use alcohol to cope with tragedy, death & trauma that he would experience every day in his profession. He points out that this situation is not unique to the medical profession, but military, police & EMT communities. When he was battling addiction, he felt that he was inadequate in his profession, by not performing the level of care that he knew he was capable of doing, and the drinking was preventing him from doing so. His wife eventually had to give him the stern intervention that he needed to get help. He realized it wasn’t himself that had the problem necessarily, but the environment he was in that w