Part I: Student, Interrupted
During my psychiatry rotation as a third-year medical student, I observed patients pacing the halls in socks, their shoelaces sealed in plastic bags (to prevent possible self-harm) along with the rest of their belongings. No phones. No laptops. Just the steady rhythm of footsteps looping around the nurses’ station.
A few months later, I found myself walking that same loop—not as a student but as a patient. My shoelaces were stored away, and I was the one being rounded on.
It was strange. I remember thinking how I’d present myself if I were the resident: “Patient is a twenty-five-year-old female admitted for bipolar disorder…” The part of my brain that was trained to diagnose and treat wouldn’t turn off, even as the rest of me was unraveling.
I’d never seen a psychiatrist until I got to med school. In my three years as a medical student, I’d tried talk therapy, dialectical-behavioral therapy, group sessions and thirteen medications—trying to find relief from the ups and downs that felt impossible to control.
I felt stuck, unable to see any light through a dense fog that obscured my vision. I felt I’d never find a way out. It only took one decision on a Tuesday evening—an attempt to end my life—to send me to the emergency room. I spent the next five days in a psychiatric unit.
Without screens to distract me, I spent most of my time talking with the other patients. There were about twenty of us, mostly in our twenties or thirties, with mood disorders, personality disorders or psychosis. We walked the halls together, sat in groups, waited for medication and meals together. We all had our own reasons for being there, but we shared something, too—the quiet ache of needing help.
“What are you here for?” feels different when you ask it while wearing sweatpants instead of a white coat. It’s more vulnerable. More real. And when someone answers, it creates a kind of bond—one built not on roles or titles but on mutual recognition of pain and of the hope for something better.
I sat by a window the first day, longing to go outside. Another patient walked up and introduced himself. Immediately, I felt better; I wasn’t alone.
“You remind me of someone,” another said. Her smile made me feel welcome.
I never expected to find community in a psychiatric unit. But I did. There was comfort in the routine, in the shared meals, in the small acts of kindness—a nurse sneaking me an extra slice of pizza, someone making space for my silence.
As day four approached, and I grew bored with coloring sheets of paper, someone new arrived. She lent me a book on the history of medicine. I felt shocked at the irony of being handed something medical-related—and incredibly grateful.
People were also honest. “You don’t need to be here,” one person said, implying that someone with my education and privilege shouldn’t end up in a place like this.
I wanted to argue—that privilege does not immunize you against despair. Instead, I nodded. Even after being admitted to a locked unit, I felt the impulse to justify my suffering.
On our last day, we hugged each other goodbye. When my turn came to be discharged, it was a strange and beautiful mix of relief and freedom. I felt that my fellow patients and I had survived something—not just the convolutions of our own minds, but the feeling of being alone in them. And now I was returning to the world, changed in ways that didn’t fit neatly into a discharge summary.
For instance, as a medical student, I’d been taught to maintain a professional distance. To be composed. Controlled. But on the psych ward, I learned that healing doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens in connection—in the quiet nod from across the room, in the shared laughter at something absurd, in how people who are hurting still find ways to show up for each other.
I learned that everyone carries their own hard things. Everyone breaks down sometimes. And sometimes, it’s the very act of breaking, and being witnessed in that break, that makes healing possible.
I still think about that endless loop we traveled around the nurses’ station—the rhythm of our feet, the unspoken understanding between strangers.
I walked it as a patient. But I’ll carry that walk within me as a doctor—a reminder that the path to healing isn’t always linear, and that no one should ever have to walk it alone.
Part II: Off the Record
“Bipolar is one of those things they throw on everyone’s chart,” an attending told me. But unlike lupus, which she also cited, bipolar isn’t something I could talk about openly.
The attending doesn’t know that, five months ago, I was admitted to a psych ward. She doesn’t know that, over these past months, my weekly appointments with my psychiatrist have kept me out of the hospital.
As I approach the end of my third year and begin thinking about applying to residencies, I realize that when I’m filling out applications or interviewing, I can’t talk about the real distance I’ve traveled. My journey is silent. That’s why I write.
This has highlighted a deep irony in the culture of medicine: We’re trained to care for people at their most vulnerable, yet we’re discouraged from showing any vulnerability ourselves.
From the first day of medical school, we’re taught to embody “professionalism”—to be composed, competent and controlled.
This is important, of course. Patients need to feel safe. They need to trust that we know what we’re doing, even when things are uncertain or scary. But somewhere along the way, “professionalism” comes to mean hiding parts of ourselves that are human—our fears, our sadness, our doubts and especially our mental-health struggles.
We ask patients to open up to us, to speak about their traumas, their mental illnesses, their deepest sources of pain. We validate them when they do. But when it comes to ourselves—whether we’re students, residents or attendings—there’s an unspoken rule: Don’t show weakness. Don’t cry. Don’t need help. Don’t be the patient.
True, medical schools and hospitals make efforts to acknowledge and help medical students and health professionals in distress.
“If you’re struggling, talk to someone,” say the posters. Crisis-line numbers hang on bathroom stalls and hallway bulletin boards.
Months after my attempt, I went to the office of student support.
“I’m not okay,” I said. “I tried to take my own life.”
The response was careful and procedural. Had I tried counseling services before? I had—many times, though not frequently enough to meet my needs. Fifty minutes every three weeks felt like a half-stitched laceration left to heal on its own.
The empathy promised by those posters never quite materialized.
As I see it, professionalism and vulnerability aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, true professionalism should include the capacity for self-awareness, empathy and honesty—including the courage to say “I’m not okay,” or “I need help.”
And, as I learned in the psych ward, sometimes the most powerful thing we can bring our patients isn’t a diagnosis or a plan; it’s the understanding that we’ve been there, too. Healing isn’t something we do to people. It’s something we walk through with them.
The loop around the nurses’ station taught me that healing is communal. The months that followed taught me that survival can also be defiance. I carry both lessons now, as a patient and as a soon-to-be physician.
Part III: Sail Sign
“Sail sign” is an X-ray finding that often indicates an occult fracture, with no visible fracture line.
I wish I could say that my hospitalization marked the bottom. It didn’t. In the months that followed, I tried to end my life again.
I couldn’t see a way forward inside a culture that required my silence. At times, it felt like one of two things must be true: Either no one could hear me, or my voice didn’t matter.
Healing didn’t feel like swimming to shore. It felt like treading water in the dark—sometimes buoyed by others, sometimes swallowing salt. Still, a quiet, stubborn part of myself kept choosing to stay.
I made changes that helped me face the future with less dread: I switched specialties and started a new psychiatric medication. Feeling shaky, I applied to residencies anyway. I interviewed anyway. I began imagining a future again.
Slowly, I began to feel something unfamiliar: anticipation. I found stability with a psychiatrist who treated me like a whole person. Healing did not mean that I stopped struggling: It meant that I stopped struggling alone.
Now I’m entering emergency medicine—a field geared to visible crises—even as I know that some of the most dangerous fractures are those you can’t see. I notice the patients in green gowns. The ones on psychiatric holds. The ones whose scars tell stories before they speak. I recognize the quiet in them.
I still dye my hair. I still get tattoos. I wear whimsical earrings into rooms that can feel sterile. What once felt rebellious now feels intentional—a small, wordless way of reassuring myself: You can breathe here.
The fracture line was never dramatic. It was almost invisible, but it was real. I’m still recovering. The sail is still being stitched.
