mental health

Emily Silverman, MD, and The Nocturnists

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Emily silverman

A live stage show featuring the stories of healthcare providers is now a podcast.

The day-to-day of internship, residency, and an MD career doesn’t allow much time to process the effect it’s having on the practitioner.  Rushing from one patient to the next, putting out the fires even while drinking from the firehose, and being selfless in service to the patients’ needs means that one’s own stories are buried, neglected.  More and more, however, medicine is acknowledging the need for practitioners to examine and tell their stories so that they can learn from them, teach their lessons to others, and show colleagues that they are not alone.  In 2015, Dr. Emily Silverman was in her second year of her internal medicine residency at UCSF.  She found herself with a little more time following her frenetic intern year, and with her own stories that had gone untold and unexamined.  She started to write, first in a blog she called The Nocturnists.  Then, in 2016 she organized the first live storytelling session with her colleagues.

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Another Student Fights Mental Illness Stigma

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bropoalypse

More and more students are speaking up about their mental illness struggles

One of the things we Short Coats agree on is that the stigma medical students and physicians face when dealing with mental illness must end. We are people, too, and thus are subject to the full range of human maladies. So when listener Kate reached out to [email protected] to tell us of her University of Michigan classmate Rahael Gupta’s JAMA article addressing her own struggles, Matt Wilson, Marisa Evers, and Gabe Conley could only respond with sympathy and admiration.

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Q&A with Dr. Ahmed Hankir, Psychiatrist and Mental Health Campaigner

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ahmed hankir

Dr. Ahmed Hankir MBChB PGCert (Psychiatry) PGCert (Epidemiology) is a specialty trainee in psychiatry in the National Health Service (UK), an Associate Professor of Psychiatry with the Carrick Institute for Graduate Studies (USA), and a Senior Research Fellow for the Bedfordshire Centre for Mental Health Research in association with Cambridge University (UK).

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Medical Students and Mental Health

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Mental health is a topic which is discussed more openly in our society in recent decades and is, slowly, become less stigmatized. This, ironically, does not seem to be the case when it comes to the issue of mental health problems among medical students. The nature of medical school, and attitudes of medical students themselves, can set up barriers between students who need help and the programs that can help them. This article looks at the widespread nature of this problem in American and overseas medical schools, and also what can be done to help solve it.

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Managing Bipolar Disorder in Medical School

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Two days before interviewing at the medical school I now attend, I couldn’t get out of bed. At the nadir of my eighth major depressive episode in eight years, I seriously considered whether I could make the trip. Thankfully, I did. And thankfully, six days after that interview I met the psychiatrist who would finally piece together my long and steadily worsening psychiatric history.

I sat in his office, quiet and dulled compared to my spring and summer self, and began recounting my story – the weightiness of my current depression, the semester in college marked by a mere two to four hours of sleep a night (“insomnia” according to my doctor then), and the clockwork nature of my mood changes each year. Within ten minutes, he stopped me mid-sentence and said, almost casually, “You know, you show a lot of signs of bipolar disorder.”

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