You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. In the midst of this unprecedented global pandemic, we're reminded how important our healers are. Doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals are in the business of saving lives. But who's helping them as they face the unrelenting pressure of their jobs?

In today's talk from TED-2019, author and anthropologist Laurel Bratman introduces us to one

effective way to make sure our healers stay healthy. Hint, it's not about their bodies. It's about

their minds.

For the last few years, I've been a writer and residence at the Stanford Medical School.

I was hired by an incredible woman. She's a poet and an anesthesiologist named Audrey Schaefer,

and she started the Medicine and the Muse program to reintroduce humanities back into medical education and training.

My job was to teach writing, storytelling, and general communication skills

to physicians, nurses, medical students, and other health care workers.

And I thought I'd get a ton of great student essays

about dissecting cadavers and poems about the spleen. And I thought I'd get a ton of great student essays about dissecting cadavers and poems about the spleen.

And I did. But almost immediately, I started getting more essays that made me really anxious and really worried.

My students were writing about their crushing anxiety, the unbearable pressure on them to succeed,

their mental health diagnoses, their suicide

attempts, how alone and isolated they felt, and wondered if they'd gone into the right profession

and they weren't even doctors yet. This is my student, Uriel Sanchez.

The choice you are given through medicine from a lot of your mentors even is, like,

you have to choose, like, being a really good person or a really good doctor.

Physicians own humanity and emotional well-being

are almost never made a core part of their training or even acknowledged.

And real vulnerability, like sharing certain mental health diagnoses, for example,

can be absolutely career-ending.

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