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For the last few years,
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I've been a writer in residence
at the Stanford Medical School.
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I was hired by an incredible woman,
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she's a poet and an anesthesiologist,
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named Audrey Shafer,
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and she started the Medicine
and the Muse Program
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to reintroduce humanities back
into medical education and training.
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My job was to teach writing, storytelling
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and general communication skills
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to physicians, nurses, medical students
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and other health care workers.
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And I thought I'd get
a ton of great student essays
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about dissecting cadavers
and poems about the spleen.
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And I did.
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But almost immediately,
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I started getting more essays
that made me really anxious
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and really worried.
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My students were writing
about their crushing anxiety,
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the unbearable pressure
on them to succeed,
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their mental health diagnoses,
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their suicide attempts,
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how alone and isolated they felt
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and wondered if they'd gone
into the right profession,
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and they weren't even doctors yet.
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This is my student Uriel Sanchez.
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(Audio) Uriel Sanchez:
The choice you are given through medicine,
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from a lot of your mentors even, is like,
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you have to choose,
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like, being a really good person
or a really good doctor.
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(Music)
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Physician's own humanity
and emotional well-being
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are almost never made
a core part of their training
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or even acknowledged.
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And real vulnerability,
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like sharing certain mental health
diagnoses for example,
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can be absolutely career-ending.
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But nearly 30 percent of American
medical students are depressed,
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and one in 10 have thought about suicide.
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And it's actually even worse
for practicing physicians.
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There's really widespread
job dissatisfaction,
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high rates of depression,
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and doctors have one
of the highest suicide rates
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of any profession in the United Sates.
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This is scary.
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Not just for them, but for us too.
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I really think doctors
have the most important job.
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And if their lives are at stake,
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ours are too.
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Now, I am absolutely not
a mental health professional,
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I'm a writer,
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which most days is absolutely
the complete and total opposite.
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But I can tell you
that the more opportunities
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that I give health care workers
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to share their daily frustrations,
their fears, their joys,
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what surprises them, whet they resent,
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the better they seem to feel.
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So at Medicine and the Muse,
we offer evening, weekend
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and day-long storytelling workshops
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at farms and other places
with really good food.
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I invite other journalists,
writers, producers,
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podcasters and poets
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and they teach writing,
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communication and storytelling skills
to our participants.
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And those participants
practice being vulnerable
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by sharing their stories
out loud with one another.
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And in doing so,
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they reconnect with what drew them
to medicine in the first place.
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These are the skills they'll draw on
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when they realize and are confronted
with the stressful, messy reality
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of the work they've chosen.
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This is how they realize it's a calling.
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So I have a prescription
here for you today.
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It's not from physicians, it's for them,
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and I asked my students for help.
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And before I start,
let me just say I work with doctors,
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but I'm absolutely convinced
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that this applies
to almost any profession,
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especially those of us
who are so committed to our work
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and it can be so intense and overwhelming,
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that sometimes we forget
why we chose to do it in the first place.
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To me, sharing a true vulnerable story
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is a lot like raising
a flag up a flagpole.
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Other people see it,
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if they agree with it
and it resonates with them,
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they come and stand under it with you.
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That's what my student
Maite Van Hentenryck did.
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(Audio) Maite Van Hentenryck:
I mean, it was super anxiety-inducing,
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and I shared parts of myself
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that I really have probably told
five classmates.
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When Maite was a baby,
she had to have her leg amputated.
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When she got to medical school,
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she was taking just a standard class quiz,
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and she got asked the question,
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"Please tell us about the first time
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you encountered someone
with a disability."
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She wondered if her supervisors
had ever considered
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that the person with the disability
was her, the doctor.
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So she talked about it in front
of about 100 of her friends, peers,
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which is a big deal, because,
you know, she's really shy.
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And afterwards, what happened,
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is a number of students with disabilities,
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that she didn't know,
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came up to her and asked her
to colead a group on campus
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that's now advocating for more visibility
and inclusion in medical training.
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In English, we tend
to call people creatives
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if they have a certain job.
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Like, designer or architect or artist.
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I hate that term.
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I think it's offensive and exclusionary.
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Creativity doesn't belong
to a certain group of people.
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A lot of my work with physicians
and medical students
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is just reminding them that no matter
what profession we choose,
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we can make meaning,
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find beauty in the hard stuff, and create.
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This is medical student Pablo Romano.
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(Audio) Pablo Romano: My parents
immigrated here from Mexico
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many years ago,
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and when I was in college,
they passed away.
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I was 18 when my dad died,
and then 20 when my mom died.
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Not only has Pablo been talking
publicly for the first time
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about being an orphan,
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but together, we started a live
storytelling series we're calling Talk Rx,
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and it's become a really
popular place for his peers
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to show their most vulnerable
and powerful thoughts and feelings.
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(Audio) PR: I go to a school
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that cares so much about data
and research and numbers.
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At the end of the day,
what moves people is stories.
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Laurel Braitman: Arifeen Rahman
is a second-year medical student.
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And before she was born,
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her parents immigrated from Bangladesh
to the United States.
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She grew up in a really beautiful home
in Northern California,
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very safe and stable,
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her parents are still together,
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she never went hungry
and she graduated from Harvard.
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(Audio) Arifeen Rahman:
I didn't feel like the stories I had
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were worth telling or that they mattered.
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LB: Arifeen did have stories, though.
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Recently, she gave a talk
about being maybe
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the only Bangladeshi American girl
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to win an essay contest
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from the Daughters
of the American Revolution --
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(Laughter)
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and then dress up for Halloween
as the Declaration of Independence.
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And I love Arifeen's story so much,
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because to me it represents
all that is good and bad
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and hard and exhausting
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about representing the new American dream.
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(Audio) AR: The hardest thing
was coming up against that voice
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that was telling me
no one wants to hear my stories,
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like, why invest the time in this thing
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that doesn't really mean anything
in the grand scale of life.
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Maybe the biggest thing is,
like, maybe it does.
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LB: Life is so short.
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For me, the only thing,
really, that matters with my time here
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is feeling like I can connect
with other people
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and maybe make them feel
slightly less alone.
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And in my experience,
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that's what stories do
absolutely the best.
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So, my student and a collaborator
in a lot of these endeavors
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is Candice Kim.
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She's an MD PhD student
in medical education.
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She's written about #MeToo in medicine,
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navigating her queer identity
in a conservative field,
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and her mom's metastatic cancer diagnosis.
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And recently, she started also
doing some really interesting research
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about our work.
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(Audio) Candace Kim:
We've seen that students
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who participate in our
storytelling opportunity
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show between a 36 and 51 percent
decrease in distress.
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If this was a mental health drug,
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it would be an absolute blockbuster.
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Results seem to last up to a month.
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It might be longer,
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a month is just when Candice
stopped measuring.
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So we don't even know.
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Not only that, but 100 percent
of our participants
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recommend these opportunities to a friend.
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For me, though, the most important thing
that our work has done
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is create a culture of vulnerability
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in a place that there was
absolutely none before.
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I think what this does
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is that it allows doctors and other folks
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an opportunity to envision
a different kind of future for themselves
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and their patients.
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This is Maite again.
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(Audio) MVH: I want to be the doctor
that remembers when your birthday is
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without having to look at the chart.
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And I want to be the doctor who knows
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what my patient's favorite color is
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and what TV shows they like to watch.
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I want to be the doctor
that's remembered for listening to people,
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and making sure
I take care of all of them,
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and not just treating their disease.
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Being human is a terminal condition.
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We all have it,
and we are all going to die.
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Helping health care professionals
communicate more meaningfully
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with each other,
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with their patients and with themselves,
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is certainly not going to magically change
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everything that is wrong
with our contemporary health care system,
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and it's not going to live to the immense
burdens we place on our physicians,
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but it is absolutely key
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in making sure that our healers
are healthy enough
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to heal the rest of us.
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Communicating with each other
with vulnerability,
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listening with compassion,
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is, I believe, the absolute best
medicine that we have.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)