On Feb. 3, President Trump signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2026, which included the Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Reauthorization Act — extending the law named for the emergency physician who died by suicide in April 2020 after working through the first wave of the COVID pandemic.
The reauthorization is funded through fiscal year 2030 with bipartisan sponsors leading the House effort. It will fund stigma-reduction campaigns, hospital wellbeing programs, and grants designed to ease the administrative burden contributing to physician burnout.
It’s a meaningful win. It’s also incomplete. Because what most directly punishes American physicians for seeking mental health care sits on a state medical licensure application.
The Federation of State Medical Boards has recommended that licensing applications limit questions to current conditions affecting fitness to practice, rather than to historical diagnoses. The Joint Commission has held the same position since 2020, urging hospitals not to ask about the history of mental health conditions or treatment.
And yet, in some states, the questions persist.
The trickle-down effect is well-documented. A 2017 Mayo Clinic Proceedings study of nearly 6,000 American physicians found that 40% reported reluctance to seek formal medical care for treatment of a mental health condition because of concerns about the repercussions to their medical license. Medscape’s 2025 Physician Mental Health and Wellbeing Report found that 42% of physicians worried that their employer or a medical board would learn about their depression.
Corey Feist, the foundation’s CEO and Lorna’s brother-in-law, named it: “We ask health workers to take care of us every day, and yet for too long, the system has made them choose between their own well-being and their license and credentials.”
The cost of that choice is real. About 300 to 400 American physicians die by suicide every year, at a rate higher than the general population and a rate that climbs further for female physicians.
In medicine, few things are worse than a resident physician crying in the office, the clinic or the stairwell — and few things are worse, after that, than asking for help and watching it land in a file.
The path forward is not contested. The Lorna Breen Foundation has verified 43 state medical boards — and more than 500 hospitals — as Wellbeing First Champions, meaning their applications no longer include intrusive mental health questions. The Federation of State Medical Boards has model language available. The remaining state boards are not waiting; they are waiting on a decision.
Congress did its part. The remaining state boards have the model language, the federal endorsement and evidence of the cost of these questions. What they are still extracting from physicians is silence.
And silence has a body count.
Frances Mei Hardin is an ear, nose and throat surgeon and author of “Surgeon on the Edge.” /InsideSources.com