The stories doctors tell: fostering narrative medicine at Stanford. From the article:

When Laurel Braitman first began teaching writing and communication skills to healthcare workers and students at the Stanford University School of Medicine in 2016, she assumed she would get some papers about blood, bones and cadavers. Instead, she read all too many essays about anxiety, depression and thoughts of suicide.

“I didn’t expect to see that level of suffering,” admits Braitman, 45, director of writing and storytelling at Stanford’s medical school. According to the American Medical Student Association, medical students are three times more likely to die by suicide than their same-age peers. “There’s a lot of pressure on these young people, particularly as many are first-generation students who are thinking about how they will provide for their family,” she says. These woes contribute to the growing strain on the U.S. healthcare system. In June, the American Medical Association said that in a survey, 63% of physicians reported feeling burned out….

“In our workshops, we talk about how to be fully human in a career that often punishes vulnerability,” Braitman says. Encouraging healthcare workers to reckon with their feelings and communicate them more effectively won’t solve the field’s mental-health crisis, she allows, “but it at least allows them to realize they are not alone.”…

Self-knowledge, Braitman says, is also essential to good writing. At Stanford, she has helped physicians and students publish personal essays and opinion pieces in leading medical journals like the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet, as well as newspapers and radio programs. In her classes on Zoom, she starts with short lessons on how to write about difficult emotions or sound like yourself on the page….

Writing programs in medical schools are still rare, but demand for them is growing. In 2020 the Association of American Medical Colleges called for more arts and humanities courses in medical education, to ensure that physicians emerge with both clinical knowledge and emotional intelligence. A 2020 paper in BMJ Open found that efforts to include more literary reading and writing in medical school helped build clinical confidence, generate empathy for patients and colleagues, and reduce feelings of burnout.

For other posts on narrative medicine, see here.