“No matter how extensive or well-developed your capacity for empathy may be, you cannot feel empathy for everyone all the time. Whether we’re talking about doctors who have never been patients, or clinicians who have never faced discrimination, w…
Category: Psychiatry
A nurse’s prayer for safety
In Catholic elementary school, we sat at our school desks, and the nuns had us pray for the lost souls in purgatory every day. If we prayed hard enough, we would pray them out of purgatory and lift them into heaven. Before I clock in, I say my anti-ass…
Free association on lessons learned as a new attending psychiatrist
There are several major transitions in a person’s medical career. The first occurs when you leave behind undergraduate life for medical school. The first term as a medical student will test your resiliency and confirm whether you are prepared to make t…
The whole person care model is seeing its day in the sun
This article is sponsored by NextGen Healthcare and the #NextGenMind campaign, empowering you to improve your overall health by seeking guidance and mental health support when you or a loved one needs it. So much emphasis has been placed in recent year…
Physicians aren’t all hanging in there. And that’s OK. [PODCAST]
“Go ahead, give yourself permission, summon the compassion and grace you’d bestow on your best friend, and tell yourself, “This is the breadth of the human experience, and I’m only human.” There is immense beauty and strength in that vulnerabilit…
Mental health and the balance between technology and the human touch
The COVID-19 pandemic escalated the mental health crisis in the U.S., with researchers estimating that 1 in 3 employees will develop a mental illness in the next 12 months. With the majority of Americans part of the U.S. workforce, the onus is increasi…
Pamela Wible on physician suicide and medicine’s culture of betrayal [PODCAST]
“When the medical profession—a career you have pursued for years, a career you love and trust to do no harm does something to shatter the foundations of your sense of trust and worldview, the resulting trauma can be severe resulting in loss of se…
Addressing online addiction has become a moral imperative
On August 30th Uncle Xi Jinping stepped into many Chinese living rooms and asked hundreds of millions of his nieces and nephews to hand over their video game controllers. Three hours per week is all they get now. According to a press release from Xinhu…
What you don’t know about pain will hurt you
Chronic pain is an epidemic, currently affecting over 100 million American adults – more than diabetes, heart disease, and cancer combined. This doesn’t include children, 1 in 3 of whom live with a chronic pain condition ranging from migraine to chroni…
Stress: Is it time to expose the alcohol con?
If you find yourself reaching for a bottle or sighing with relief at a well-deserved glass of wine at the end of a stressful day, then you are not alone. Far more people than you can imagine do the same thing, and many of them feel ashamed that they do…
