Medical students often struggle to maintain the idealism and compassion that brought them to the medical field in the first place—all the while trying to take care of themselves mentally and emotionally. When threatened by stress, challenges to these ideals often cross over into how physicians-in-training care for patients. In turn, patients relay tales of harsh, insensitive physicians.
In The Mindful Medical Student: A Psychiatrist’s Guide to Staying Who You Are While Becoming Who You Want to Be (Dartmouth College Press, $19.95), Dr. Jeremy Spiegel offers advice on navigating medical school while keeping your love of humanity—and your sanity—intact.
Spiegel tackles issues unique to medical school students, and takes a spiritual approach that’s much dif-ferent than what’s offered in many run-of-the-mill self-help books. He addresses ethical dilemmas, emotional shutdown and caregiver burnout through the lenses of Zen Buddhism, psychodynamic theory, dream interpre-tation and Jungian archetypes.
The author emphasizes the “true self” and the “false self.” When parents’ expectations, societal pressures and peer influences are stripped away, the student’s remaining values, ideals and dreams epitomize her true self.
The false self is the person you have suddenly become when you loudly imitate residents who mock pa-tients just outside their rooms. It’s the false self that is morbidly fascinated by a hideous teratoma, and forget-ting it’s being taken out of an actual human being. Spiegel states that to counteract the false self, you should ponder whether your attitudes or your actions are harming the learning process or your relationships with oth-ers, especially your patients. You should examine if how you think and what you are doing are at odds with the true reasons you had entered medicine in the first place. Answering these questions can help you maintain authenticity and creativity throughout your education.
The book delves into the personalities of patients and superiors in the medical hierarchy. For a medical student, that means everyone. Important points include handling the “difficult personas of others” and unplea-sant “personality types.” The author explores why certain situations can drive one student to rage while another student barely notices. Spiegel, a psychiatrist in Portland, Maine, advocates bonding with classmates to form a support system that not only benefits you in medical school, but helps you develop close relationships with future colleagues.
Opportunities abound to apply the book’s wisdom: Take time to meditate on the subway. Pick a piece of artwork that most embodies your inner mind; use it to continually examine whether “your attitude, voice, and words are consistent with the kind of person you’ve always been.”
Upon finishing medical school, Spiegel recommends a more involved exercise: Mentally edit your expe-riences into a visual narrative to create a “montage” or “intrapsychic DVD” to “heal emotional and psychic wounds.” Such a process, he writes, can help you find meaning in the professional world.
Sometimes the tips, tricks, activities and exercises prescribed seem a tad unsophisticated, or even goofy, not to mention time-consuming. But for the student looking for inner peace, and a unique take on surviving medical school, this book might be worth its weight in gold.
Kirsten Ware is a fourth-year at Western University of Health Sciences, College of Osteopathic Medicine of the Pacific. She plans to practice family medicine.