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The SelfWork Podcast

220 SelfWork: Careers That Kill: A Conversation with Dr. Adam Hill

The SelfWork Podcast

Margaret Robinson Rutherford PhD

Education, Health & Fitness, Mental Health, Self-improvement

4.81.3K Ratings

🗓️ 26 February 2021

⏱️ 40 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This is the first in a series here on SelfWork about careers that can kill. Over the next few months, we're going to interview people who are led to careers that hold within them the ever-increasing danger of suicidal ideation or suicide itself. Doctors, police officers, the military. We are losing the people that we, as a culture, expect to do very difficult jobs psychologically. Yet the professions themselves don't encourage mental health treatment, or even disparage those that reveal struggle.

Sometimes you don’t know why, but you’re drawn to someone or to their story. Adam Hill is one of those people for me. Adam presented himself as a thoughtful guy as well as being a doctor who’d trained as a pediatric oncologist at some of the finest schools and research centers the USA has to offer. And then came the fact that he is a recovering alcoholic. He's the author of Long Walk Out of The Woods – which when you read the book, you totally get that he’s not simply talking metaphorically, but quite literally -as he nearly ended his own life in a deep, sheltered place in the woods.

So I wanted to talk to this man who’d risked everything career-wise to reveal his struggle with severe depression and alcoholism –  and become not only a doctor, but now a mental health advocate whose fighting to change how his profession’s licensing boards and entire medical community views seeking help for mental illness or substance abuse.

So I  present to you Dr. Adam Hill. His story is riveting and may carry within it something important for you or your loved one to hear.

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

This is Selfwork, and I'm Dr. Margaret Rutherford.

0:14.1

At Selfwork, we'll discuss psychological and emotional issues common in today's world

0:19.0

and what to do about them.

0:20.4

I'm Dr. Margaret, and Selfwork is a podcast dedicated to you taking just a few minutes today

0:26.2

for your own Selfwork.

0:29.8

Hello and welcome or welcome back to Selfwork.

0:32.7

I'm Dr. Margaret Rutherford. I'm so glad you're here.

0:35.4

I'm a clinical psychologist at a fave Arkansas, and I began Selfwork a little over four years ago

0:41.3

in order to extend the walls of my practice to those of you who might already be extremely

0:46.2

interested in psychotherapy or emotional psychological issues and want to know more

0:51.4

to those of you who might have been initially diagnosed with something you're looking for answers

0:56.6

or you're in a relationship that's confusing or you're having some problems that you don't

1:00.6

understand, but also to a group of you who might think I don't really understand therapy,

1:06.6

I don't get it, I never go, but you're curious enough to want to listen to a psychologist like

1:12.7

me talk about different issues, and certainly what I'm hoping is that you'll get a chance to hear

1:19.0

what it might be like to actually be in therapy. Selfwork isn't therapy, but it might give you

1:25.6

a hint of what it would be like to be in therapy. So welcome to you all. Sometimes you don't know why,

1:31.0

but you're drawn to someone or to their story. Adam Hill is one of those people for me.

1:36.6

I'm not much into Twitter, but I'm on it, and I'd like some of his comments they were endearing

1:41.0

about his relationship with his kids. Although he was a doctor, he didn't seem to have drunk the

1:45.8

Kool-Aid that so many doctors do. Now I think that's a part of how they handle the very

1:50.7

gruesome things they see, so certainly I forgive them, most of them for that kind of detachment

...

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