Healing the healers: An advocate and a psychiatrist on clinicians’ mental health and burnout

This week on the “First Opinion Podcast,” I’m joined by Corey Feist and Wendy Dean to talk about the toll that practicing medicine can take on a health care worker’s mental health, and how the pandemic has made this worse.

Feist co-wrote an essay on legislation supporting physician mental health with his wife, Jennifer Breen Feist, the sister of Lorna Breen, a New York City emergency physician who died by suicide in April 2020 after contracting Covid-19 and then returning to work. Wendy Dean is a psychiatrist who wrote with fellow physician Simon Talbot an iconic First Opinion in 2018 about the moral injury that many physicians experience.

“We’ve got to do something differently in this industry,” Feist said at one point. “This is not about making the canaries stronger. This is about redesigning the coal mine.”

Be sure to sign up for the weekly “First Opinion Podcast” on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you have any feedback for us — First Opinion authors to feature on the podcast, vocal mannerisms the host needs to jettison, kudos or darts — email us at [email protected] and please put “podcast” in the subject line.