Depression is commonly linked to career disappointments, financial setbacks, and disruption of normal routines — especially sleep pattern — as well as social pressures and conflict in personal relationships. It is this last factor that has captured my attention in relation to depression. Personal relationships, in particular, the most personal, love partnerships, have a profound […]
When I was first reading up on JM (identifying information changed), I thought the case would go smoothly, well, as smoothly as any inpatient psychiatry case can go. All I had known about her is that she was an elderly woman who was recently released from jail. When the staff came to escort JM to […]
Medicine has created a culture where public embarrassment, bullying, and passive-aggression have become pedagogy. How can we seek to care for others, when we treat our own so cruelly? I recently met Angie (name changed), a young university student who had entered the clinical years of medical school. Like many, she was introduced to medicine […]
In the era of #MeToo, Missy Elliot, Whitney Houston, Tyler Perry, Oprah, Ashley Judd, Gabrielle Union, Teri Hatcher and, now, Padma Lakshmi — keeping kids safe and helping adults heal is our job as physicians. I am a pediatrician — and I am an incest survivor. My perpetrator was also a physician. I bore a […]
My medical center recently cemented an agreement with the Veterans Administration to offer care to veterans who could not be accommodated at the VA. We need paying patients, they need doctors of our caliber — establishing mutual benefit. Military veterans have always been among our patients. During my professional lifetime that has included men of […]
I am both relieved and nervous because they say that the first year is the worst, but now I have the overarching cloud of doom following me around during second year: Step 1. Now that I’m home, I constantly am wondering how I made it this far — in disbelief that I passed all my […]
With the recent 10-year anniversary of the Mental Health Parity Act being signed into law, comes the reminder that we still have so much work to be done. Unfortunately, blatant discrimination in health insurance coverage for mental health and substance abuse has continued despite this legislation. The Parity Act required that dollar limits on mental […]
The absence of burnout does not equal wellness. While the focus on physician burnout as an epidemic is finally gaining more attention, we may be missing a larger issue. Most physicians are not burned out. We are able to function. We get through our days, make it to some of our kids’ activities and even […]
“Wisdom is nothing more than healed pain.” –Robert Gary Lee One of the recurring expressions I heard throughout training, from preceptors and attendings to doctors ignoring a lowly medical student/resident eating lunch in the doctor’s lounge, was: “I’m living the dream.” It didn’t take long for me to realize that it was a code meaning […]
The children of survivors are important to the Holocaust story. The children are the future of the past. For a time, it seemed that no one would be left to create a future. That history has been so carefully, lovingly chronicled. It must be preserved. If it is preserved and told, the possibility exists that […]
