Physician Burnout and Mental Health

Fear of cancer recurrence is a human response, not a flaw

Conditions and Diseases

June 8, 2026

In oncology and survivorship care, one of the most common (and often least visible) experiences patients carry is fear of recurrence.

For many people, finishing treatment brings a sense of relief. But it can also bring something quieter that lingers. A watchfulness. A heightened sensitivity to the body. A subtle shift in how the future feels.

For others, this way of thinking begins earlier (at diagnosis, during treatment, or in the spaces …

Mental health ghost networks are badly hurting patients

Steve Cohen, JD

Conditions and Diseases

June 8, 2026

Daria D. learned how dangerous a “ghost network” is while fearing that her son would kill himself. Daria was desperate to find a psychiatrist to help her teenage son, who was suicidal. She called more than a dozen doctors listed in her insurance company’s provider directory. Half were listed with telephone numbers that did not work. The other half said they did not take her insurance or could not see …

Physician burnout is not the whole diagnosis

Gus W. Krucke, MD

Physician

June 7, 2026

Reason for consultation

Burnout. Workforce decline. Moral distress. Concern regarding physician formation.

Chief complaint

Burnout.

History of present illness

Medicine presents with burnout. Chronic. Recurrent. Poorly responsive to treatment.

Associated symptoms now include workforce shortages, declining interest in primary care, moral distress, loss of meaning, and concern regarding what kind of people the profession is forming.

Treatment efforts have been substantial. Wellness initiatives. Resilience training. Mindfulness. Workflow redesign. Administrative intervention. Repeated attempts to improve work-life balance. Partial …

What does mental health when bedbound actually look like?

Kristian Keefer

Conditions and Diseases

June 7, 2026

The first time it really hit me how small my world had gotten, it was not during a hospital stay or anything big like that. It was something simple. I remember thinking about running out to grab something quick, just a normal errand. And then it hit me that even that was not really an option for me anymore. It was just a regular day. That was the part that …

How clinicians with chronic illness lose more than health

Jamie Lynn Bagley, DNP

Conditions and Diseases

June 7, 2026

I built my career on caring, compassion, and a deep desire to help others.

As a psychiatric nurse practitioner with a doctorate, I was trained to understand suffering: to listen closely, recognize patterns, and validate experiences that others might overlook. That work wasn’t just professional. It was personal. Long before I became a clinician, I was a patient.

I have lived with symptoms for most of my life. But like many patients, …

Physician spouses are paying an uncounted price

Kendra Harvey

Conditions and Diseases

June 6, 2026

The story medicine tells about itself is a good one. Dedicated professionals. Years of sacrifice. Lives saved. We celebrate Match Day. We honor long residencies with the understanding that something great is being built.

What we don’t count is who else paid the price.

I’ve been married to a neurosurgeon for 22 years. We moved through one of the longest, most demanding surgical training programs in medicine, and I want to be …

Leaving medicine is a translation problem, not a loss

Shveta Gupta, MD, MBA

Physician

June 6, 2026

At 6:41 on a Tuesday morning, a physician sits in the hospital parking garage after a long shift and reads an email on her phone three times. “We would love to understand how your clinical background translates to this role.” She has been a physician for twenty years. She has taken care of septic children at 2 a.m. She has told families their child won’t make it. She has built …

The Medicaid reckoning for applied behavior analysis

Steven Merahn, MD

Conditions and Diseases

June 5, 2026

The growing scrutiny of applied behavior analysis (ABA) within Medicaid is widely misunderstood within the behavior analytic community as an attack on the profession or its science. It is neither. The root cause is structural. Medicaid programs, whether state-managed or administered through managed care organizations, operate on fixed annual allocations called “premiums,” funded by a blend of federal and state dollars. Each child’s premium is essentially a predetermined budget meant …

Mental health in intellectual disability is real, not less

Mallory Hellman

Conditions and Diseases

June 3, 2026

Mental health is often discussed as if it belongs to a certain kind of person. Someone who can articulate their feelings clearly. Someone who can describe anxiety, name sadness, or explain what feels off. But this way of thinking leaves out an entire group of people whose emotional lives are just as real, even if they are expressed differently.

People with intellectual disabilities experience stress, frustration, loneliness, and joy in deeply …

Psychedelics in psychiatry are not a neural reset

Farid Sabet-Sharghi, MD

Physician

June 3, 2026

The history of psychiatry is often a story of our own impatience. When we look back at the era of the ice-pick lobotomy, we tend to view it as a distant, primitive horror. But if we look closer, the impulse behind it remains very much alive. It was the dream of the “quick fix,” the belief that if we could just physically alter the brain, we could bypass the messy, …

DEA fear is reshaping how doctors prescribe

Ronald L. Lindsay, MD

Physician

June 2, 2026

For more than three decades, I prescribed Schedule II stimulants to children and adolescents with ADHD. I did it carefully, consistently, and always within clinical standards. Yet throughout those years, I carried a quiet, persistent fear, not of harming patients, but of being misinterpreted by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

That fear wasn’t irrational. It was structural.

The DEA’s enforcement posture has long treated volume as suspicion, clinical judgment as potential misconduct, …

Youth online gambling is the new opioid crisis

Kayvan Haddadan, MD

Conditions and Diseases

June 2, 2026

Gen X (roughly 1965 to 1980) grew up as “latchkey kids” with no constant internet, more independence, figuring things out through trial and error. They often developed real resilience from facing hardships without much handholding. Gen Z (1997 to 2012) entered a world saturated with technology, social media, instant information, and a big emphasis on mental health. Many are thoughtful about emotional well-being but can be less practiced …

Health care worker burnout doesn’t end at retirement

Phyllis DiSalvo Katz

Conditions and Diseases

June 1, 2026

The dream is always the same.

I’m pushing the ultrasound machine down a hospital hallway with an X-ray tech beside me. We’re on our way to do a portable exam when a voice crackles overhead: “Radiology to the ER. STAT.” She peels away toward the emergency department, and I turn back toward imaging alone. Then I can’t find my way back.

I step into elevators that open onto unfamiliar floors. I push …

The Goldwater Rule and the cost of psychiatric silence

Timothy Lesaca, MD

Conditions and Diseases

May 31, 2026

When the American Psychiatric Association formalized Section 7.3 of its Principles of Medical Ethics in 1973, it acted with a clear sense of urgency. Nine years earlier, the psychiatric profession had profoundly embarrassed itself in a partisan poll published by Fact magazine, where 1,189 psychiatrists, without any clinical examinations, labeled Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater “psychologically unfit.” The diagnoses were sloppy, weaponized, and defamatory.

The decayed fortress of silence

In response, the …

Why physician mentorship is a structural intervention

Seleipiri Akobo, MD, MPH, MBA

Physician

May 29, 2026

There is a quiet crisis playing out in medicine that we rarely name directly: physicians who are extraordinarily competent and profoundly lost.

In the current landscape of health care, “autonomy” often feels like a relic of the past. We were trained to diagnose, treat, and lead, to be clinical experts. Yet many find themselves trapped in systems that prioritize throughput over professional sovereignty. We were not trained to navigate a system …

Psychiatry and human suffering are not always the same

Devina Maya Wadhwa, MD

Physician

May 28, 2026

By most measures, the treatment was working. The symptoms had improved. Sleep was more consistent. The edge of panic had softened into something more manageable. The medications were tolerated, the therapy was progressing, and the follow-ups were steady.

On paper, this was what success in psychiatry is supposed to look like, and yet, something in the room said otherwise. It is not always obvious. There is no scale that captures it …

Psychedelics and neuroplasticity are rewiring the brain

Marc Arginteanu, MD

Conditions and Diseases

May 28, 2026

For most of my career as a neurosurgeon, I’ve worked under a cold, hard assumption: The brain’s wiring, once trashed or locked into a pathological rut, is remarkably stubborn. We can resect a tumor, clip an aneurysm, or untether a nerve, but the deeper circuits driving depression, PTSD, and trauma often laugh at our scalpels and stay stubbornly resistant to standard medications. For decades, the standard fix for PTSD or …

The quiet shift that changes physician decision making

Bertina Marie Hooks, MD

Physician

May 27, 2026

There is a subtle but profound shift that happens when your identity changes.

Not the kind of shift that comes with a new title or role, but the kind that is forced. The kind that emerges when something foundational is altered, and the assumptions you once relied on no longer hold in the same way.

For physicians, identity is often tightly interwoven with decision-making. We are trained to trust our judgment, to …

When a code blue on the psychiatry unit ends in a police interview [PODCAST]

The Podcast by KevinMD

Podcast

May 26, 2026

Subscribe to The Podcast by KevinMD. Watch on YouTube. Catch up on old episodes!

You hear code blues overhead in a hospital all the time, but one on a psychiatry unit is different. A young patient died after a cardiac event, and what followed looked nothing like …

Spirituality is a remedy for physician burnout

Jessica Singh, MD

Physician

May 25, 2026

A physician, whom I will call Dr. Hannah, initially sought coaching from me to address burnout and optimize clinical documentation in the electronic medical record. One of the major challenges that surfaced in her first coaching session was that she did not know who she was outside of work. She also wanted to bring more joy, fulfillment, and meaning into her life. Dr. Hannah’s schedule was so intense that she …