Category: Psychiatry

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…

A physician’s postpartum depression [PODCAST]

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Catch up on old episodes! “I may be practicing the art of repression and washing myself of any speck of contamination that would take me back to the state from which I have come very far. My suffering of the p…

The holidays can open up a range of emotions

Physician suicide rates are unacceptably high at baseline and go even higher during the holidays. The holiday increase in suicide rates is not unique to physicians, though. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), A 2021 survey show…