It Can Be Therapeutic: Doctors and Football Players Who Also Cry

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PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

Neither football players in America nor doctors are known to cry. For the most part, crying is covertly or overtly discouraged.

As the article on February 8th asked, “Why does Chris Jones cry? You should hear how he got here.”¹ Jones is one of the best players on the losing Super Bowl team, the Kansas City Chiefs, and is known for crying. It would not be surprising if he cried after the Super Bowl loss, as that is the biggest loss of football and his team was playing for a record. However, what he has also become known for is crying before any important game. After gathering his thoughts during the National Anthem, tears fall down his face, usually as a recognition and recollection of how far he has come in life. In the macho game of football, he is a rarity.

Similarly, clinicians are often discouraged from crying, certainly publicly with patients, and even privately. We clinicians, both men and women, are usually supposed to be strong, stoic, and in control of our emotions. Social support or discouragement for crying makes a difference for whether this evolutionary processing of emotional pain or pleasure is used. Often, women are socially reinforced for crying and men not as much. Babies of any gender cry the most at a developmental time when they are so reliant on help. However, perhaps the discouragement in physicians is overdone and there should be valued and therapeutic times when doctors do cry, both from sadness and joy, alone or publicly.

Finally, a book, just published in India in its second edition, presents some of those times.² I serendipitously happened to receive my author copy right before the Super Bowl. I led off the 64 example vignettes with “A Psychiatrist Who Cried 40 Years Later.” As part of a panel discussion about the suicide of a teenage girl in our community some years back, I cried when I started to discuss my part of the presentation. I had chosen my one patient who ever died by suicide. This happened way back in residency training, but obviously I had not finished my grieving. Guess who I was comforted by? The father of the girl! It did further process my grieving, and the loss and shame now seems to be resolved.

The next vignette was titled “From the Ashes,” a case of a homicide burning of a new wife in India. The clinician was on his first night as an intern when she became his patient. Though likely to die with 64% surface burns, the patient-clinician relationship seemed to provide necessary hope. A few days after the intern had transferred to the outpatient clinic, a beautiful lady with her face covered came to him, and with tears of more joy than sadness, said:

“Doctor, I returned from the jaws of death and I have cooked this for you with the same fingers where were charred and burnt beyond recognition before your healing touch, like a fairy’s magical wand, brought life back into me.”

Tears then rolled down the face of the intern.

There may be more reasons for doctors to cry now. One of them is working in countries where the burnout of clinicians is high because we are blocked by the system from the kind of healing we know we can provide.

If you read the vignettes as well as the 13 related poems, get ready to cry. Genuine crying releases oxytocin and endorphins that enhance calmness and connection. Like other nonverbal behaviors, it can be faked for other manipulative goals, often called crocodile tears. Those crocodile tears often are not accompanied by any other displays of suffering.

Hopefully, this book will also soon be published in the United States and other countries because the crying challenge is universal. A summary like this cannot do justice to the book. The stories are so poignant that 1 a day, not too close to bedtime, might be the best way to read this book, processing it, savoring it, and reaffirming why we are privileged to be healers. It is guaranteed that some will break your heart and some will expand your heart. It can be therapeutic in its cathartic expression of emotions and prosocial when others provide support.³ We might also just cry for the underlying best of humanity in the trusting doctor-patient relationship that will not be found in artificial intelligence.

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He presented the third Rabbi Jeffrey B. Stiffman lecture at Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis on Sunday, May 19, 2024. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.

References

1. Kilgore A. Why does Chris Jones cry? You should hear how he got here. The Washington Post. February 8, 2025. Accessed February 11, 2025. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2025/02/08/chris-jones-cry/

2. Goel A, ed. Doctors Do Cry . . . The Stories Doctors Rarely Tell! 2nd edition. Paras Medical Publisher; 2025.

3. Balsam LM, Vingerhoets AJJM, Rottenberg J. When is crying cathartic? An international study. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. 2008;27(10):1165-1187.