Careers

A look at the emotional side of medicine—the shame, fear, anger, anxiety, empathy, and even love that affect patient care.

Dr Dennis S. Charney is Dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and President for Academic Affairs for the Mount Sinai Health System. He is also a world expert in the neurobiology and treatment of mood and anxiety disorders, making fundamental contributions to the understanding of the causes of human anxiety, fear, and depression, and the discovery of new treatment for mood and anxiety disorders. 

Watch Dr Steve Peters talk about Optimising the Performance of the Human Mind at TedxYouth@Manchester in 2012 and listen to Dr Raj Persaud speaking with Steve at the Royal College of Psychiatrists Annual Congress in Birmingham in 2015.

The ‘Foundation for Positive Mental Health’ has a series of twelve 15 minute audio tapes which are based on work  undertaken supporting elite athletes. You listen to each one every day for a week (or as close as you can manage).

Rainy Brain Sunny Brain is the work of Professor Elaine Fox in Oxford, and has lots of relevant themes. Her website enables you to self-assess your optimism score and various other things www.rainybrainsunnybrain.com 

Sven Hansen originally trained a doctor and now runs management courses on resilience. He summarises the work of others, and has an interesting model of resilience which demonstrates how you can spiral up and down.  

Published in Medical Education 2012: 46: 349–356

This article explores the concept of resilience and its potential relevance to medicine. It also looks at the dimensions of resilience and its ethical importance for effective professional practice, and considers whether a focus on resilience might be useful in medical training.

Published in Canadian Family Physician. 2008 May; 54(5): 722-729

The objective of this study was to explore the dimensions of family physician resilience.  The study was carried out in Ontario, Canada and four main aspects of physician resilience were identified: