“He’s batshit crazy,” fellow physician Karen eagerly confides while describing another colleague, Kevin, in a private office conversation. I laugh, assuming intended hyperbole. “No. Really. He is,” Karen says. “He…
Category: Psychiatry
Maternalism: a better approach to psychiatric care
Patient autonomy, one of the pillars of medical ethics, now shines brightest of the four pillars in modern medicine. While medical ethics was meant to take beneficence, non-maleficence, justice and autonomy in equal consideration, the balance is now of…
Understanding patients’ religious and spiritual beliefs promotes healing
Religious and spiritual experiences have shaped my worldview since I was a teenager. At age 13, I celebrated my bar mitzvah. Later that year, I underwent an appendectomy. A priest asked my mother if he could pray for me prior to the operation. My mothe…
My journey parenting with chronic depression as a physician mom
I remember feeling like I was on an island, and any time I separated from her and put her down, I frantically looked around for her, daydreaming she was lost at sea. When I was pregnant, everything was contained and controlled. Her womb gymnastics, eve…
Reflections from a (former) self-compassion and boundary setting skeptic
Self-compassion does not make you soft. Boundaries do not make you closed off or selfish. I had to repeat this many times before I started to understand how true and how essential self-compassion and boundaries are in our lives. I did not realize how m…
It can happen to you too: Women in medicine also experience domestic abuse
The luridness of it made me feel like the female lead in a bad Lifetime movie. The person whom I trusted most was a monster: an affair with a middle-aged prostitute who verbally abused me, an Ashley Madison account, and countless payments to sex worker…
5 questions C-suite leaders must be willing to ask to address burnout and create thriving health care organizations
Our health care employees are suffering from the after-effects of COVID, the great resignation, stripped-down staffing levels, and the misrepresentation of human clinicians as factory floor machines. When frontline employees and senior managers are dep…
EMDR therapy’s transformative power [PODCAST]
Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Catch up on old episodes! “EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) therapy kicked off my personal transformation from a self-absorbed workaholic in an industry of (what I now view as) questionable…
I used OpenAI to generate art on health care burnout. The images were startlingly moving.
After seeing recent images from OpenAI’s DALL-E-2 art generator, I decided to give it a try. I thought about a topic that I am interested in, others I know are interested in, and I was curious to see an AI’s ability to interpret. I decided …
Physicians are masterful at hiding. It’s part of the training.
Dr. Dominic Corrigan appeared to have it all. He’d wanted to be a doctor since he was young. So he worked hard, got into med school, took out a loan and did what it took to realize his dream. “I was high functioning, upwardly mobile, respec…
