It's no secret that medical school is challenging. You have
a lot less ownership over your time. You have a lot of demands
on you intellectually, academically, logistically. You
know after about a year, year and a half, the constant sleep
deprivation and the constant demands really just began to
wear on me. I had really lost touch with the things that were
the most important to me, the things that I value the most
about myself: my intellectual curiosity, my interest in
helping other people and really my will to live.
The rate of depression, anxiety and even suicidal feelings are incredibly
high among residents at Michigan and medical students around the country.
I just was so frustrated and so down on myself
and so unsure of my ability to be successful. I've never had
thoughts like this before, just kind of these intrusive thoughts
of it would be better if I just stepped into the street right now and a car ran me over.
People fail to recognize their colleagues who are suffering. And what made the difference
here is that people were attuned to the issue of depression and
suicidality in medical trainees. Because they were attuned to it,
they were able to recognize what I was going through.
What I had was one person in a position of power recognizing that I wasn't
lazy or weak or fragile, that I was sick. I pride myself in
being work hard play hard, resilient person. She said,
Rahael would you consider seeing a psychiatrist? In the fragile
state that I was in, I recognize that she had a point. I do not
exaggerate when I say it saved my life. It was a very gradual
process of getting better over six months to a year. I took
medication. I took time off school, and yeah I do see my
psychiatrist. I make time for things in the interest of my
mental health. There was a resident in the fall who
committed suicide at our school. I couldn't get over how that
could have been me. I wrote an essay about my own struggle with
depression and suicidality while in medical school and published
it in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
We had an instinct initially to push back and say, have you
thought about how this will affect your career and how other
people view you, but quickly came to realize that that was
sort of the point and that she's willing to sort of take that
risk for all the good it would do for other people.
I received hundreds of letters from around the world. Once Rahael and her cohort are the
ones running medicine, I'm confident that the stigma will
be gone. I needed to put energy into showing people that it's
okay to be vulnerable and that I had had this experience and that
there were many other people that were suffering and that it
didn’t have to be that way.