Writer's Contest

My patient allowed me a glimpse into the suicidal mind. And, in that way, she taught me a lot.

The human-animal relationship can provide insight into the patient’s ability to connect, to interact, and to show care and empathy. Plus, companion animals tend not to breach confidentiality.

A recent experience on street rounds offered a moment that brought this psychiatrist back to one of the main reasons she chose psychiatry as a profession.

A psychiatrist realizes he is completely powerless against his patient's opiate addiction.

In a tale of two cases, the author comes to realize he is but one agent of change in the lives of his patients.

A psychiatrist's chess game with his patient didn't go the way he expected.

The therapist "goes underwater" with the patient to find what lies in her mind.

"You just never think people like that can have normal children.” And then I I think of when I was 14 years old and answered a late-night phone call at home.

To this day, I fiercely debate whether I would want to remember such an experience if it had happened to me. How tortured would I feel?

Now, when I think back O.P's plight and isolation, I marvel that he could remain standing. He reminds me of many other courageous young men-the writer, the newly graduated physician, and all the others whom I treated and who died of AIDS. He also reminds me of the vibrant gay community that was destroyed by a microscopic retrovirus.

Jewell’s answer taught me that successful diagnosis and treatment of an illness weren’t everything. They were not the most important things.

Being an outpatient psychiatrist is a lot like being married. Things go along, the same-old, for long periods. But then there's a moment. Today, with Leslie, I remember why I love my work.

When even listening fails, presence is all that’s left.

This is the story of Peter. I feel chosen to have gotten to know him and to have the memory of what such an experience has carved into me.

Even though I’ve read these stories a number of times, I still have an intense emotional response to each of them. They remind me that our work is of incredible personal importance to our patients and of such emotional meaning to us too.

"You don’t have the hands of a surgeon, or the demeanor. It’s a good thing you are a psychiatrist.”

I will always remember her. I was honored and inspired by a very beautiful, strong, and unusually graceful young woman.

When you have been neglected, made to feel so unimportant, passed around from place to place as though your life doesn’t matter, any genuine caring attention you can give that young person means the world.