Oh I didn't mean to imply a moral dimension with those comparisons, sorry! Only that she needs to treat this as a situation where her boyfriend is physically incapable of boyfriending for a set time, and may be a different person when he comes back. Maybe military enlistment is a better comparison, except that Basic is probably less traumatic.

Though I would say that medical residency isn't entirely unlike a medical condition - the level of sleep deprivation forced on medical residents would be classified as serious mental impairment if there was a different cause. If it's hitting him badly he likely isn't capable of making the choices he would if he were ok and she needs to know that too. This isn't "he chose to be in a stressful job" this is "he's been forced by a deliberately abusive system into a place where he is, by design, being systematically destroyed physically and mentally."