Dr. Wesley Boyd, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard, has spent years working with state programs that help doctors, nurses and other health care workers who have become addicted to opioids get back on their feet professionally. He supports…
They received a call that their 19-year-old son had been transported to the local hospital, extremely agitated and intoxicated, with a blood alcohol level of .245. What they learned over the next few days was that this wasn’t the first time their son h…
Some weeks ago, this writer visited with a friend who had been admitted to an inpatient psychiatric unit of a New York hospital. The friend had been there for a few weeks. Other patients have been there for longer. After spending approximately an hour …
After practicing psychiatry and behavioral health for nearly 25 years, I’m done. I feel sick, and especially sicker from my occupation. Not merely burned out, but ill. Primarily mentally. I’ve always had complex post-traumatic stress disorder. And depr…
Today was like no other day. It was our first day together. Me and my “virtual” scribe — an actual person who seems to “virtually” to exist inside of a Jabra speaker on my desk and so subtlety that I forgot to mute a few times w…
I had a brief, quiet, intense conversation with a friend today. She had just lost another friend, a close one, to a sudden and tragic accident. “How are you doing?” I asked. “OK,” she replied as she turned to go up the hallway. In a second, I knew bett…
I love my husband. Not in a common way. My emotional reserve was so shallow that by afternoon, anything but solitude felt like an assault. I was obligated and determined to meet the needs of my daughters, and after that, I had nothing left. I love my k…
Students’ time in medical school should help them grow and become insightful, caring doctors. Instead, medical education is somehow turning smart, gifted, enthusiastic applicants into exhausted and unhappy students who become interns, residents, and ph…
Much has been written and said about the role of Facebook and social media in our society. Only recently has the increasingly dark side of what was once thought to be a monumental transformation of humanity come into public discourse. Initially, the p…
Ever feel like you are always on the go, not feeling comfortable slowing down? All through school, college, medical school, residency, and then practicing medicine, the one thing that I got really good at was staying busy. Planning projects, test-takin…
