“The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted everyone, especially those of us in health care. Our way of practicing medicine has been changed; some would say forever. We find ourselves affected not only clinically but also emotionally. As a result, clin…
Category: Psychiatry
Marijuana legalization: an unpopular view
In the mid-1990s, a few pharmaceutical companies made broad claims regarding the safety and efficacy of opioid medications for pain management. These claims were based on limited research that did not fully account for these drugs’ potentially ha…
Emotional support animals for health care providers
Me: “Hey buddy, how was your day?” Salem: “Meow meow meow!” Me: “Really? That sounds so cool! What else did you do today? I missed you so much!” My favorite part of each day is coming home to my sweet boy, Salem. He is a 2-year-old cat that I adopted f…
Physicians are an underserved population about their own mental health care
COVID-19 has shed light on a pre-existing condition in medicine – our health care system has failed to tend to its workforce’s well-being. While generally privileged, physicians are an underserved population about their own mental health care. Nu…
Trauma is ever-present in the practice of medicine
Some forms of trauma are obvious: natural disasters like earthquakes, floods, fires, being physically assaulted, wrongfully terminated, becoming suddenly very ill. Trauma is divided into so-called big T and little t experiences, but the distinction is …
My Klonopin withdrawal story
It was September 11, 2001. My dad had cheated on my mom again, the building that I worked in at that time had received an anonymous tip that we were a potential target for the terrorist attacks, and my mom, who needed a reprieve from my dad’s crap, was…
Training in psychiatry would give me the opportunity to understand suicide far better
An excerpt from Becoming a Doctors’ Doctor: A Memoir. After about six months of my residency in internal medicine, I began to feel something was missing, though at the time I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Then, after a series of general med…
A physician hung himself. That could have been me.
The mood hung in the air like a clenched jaw, a clenched fist, and slumped shoulders. I watched a fellow patient shuffle by the nurses’ station with his little paper cup. You know, the ones that are an inch or two tall and wide with a slight lip; the k…
COVID malaise, and more COVID-19 coping tips from the trenches
I write this now as both a time capsule and a vision of hope at the bitter end of 2020. At this point, a COVID-19 vaccine (the vision of hope) has been developed by several companies but has not yet received widespread distribution. Realistically, I kn…
A physician’s perspective on what therapy is
Therapy is a treatment intended to heal a disorder. That’s the medical perspective anyway, and it’s not wrong, but it’s maybe only part of the picture. Therapy frequently begins by addressing a primary complaint or problem in a collaborative relationsh…
