Name: Perspectives of Both a Psychiatrist and Patient Accessing Mental Health Care with @JakeGoodmanMD
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T16:33:01.000Z
Duration: 30 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hello and welcome to Beyond the Diagnosis.

I'm your host, Monica, a neuroscience graduate and current medical student in Canada.

Adverbs of degree

Physicians are often regarded to have a very fulfilling, desirable career.

But what often that's not talked about is behind the scenes.

Today, our topic is about the mental health of physicians and physicians in training from the perspective of someone who has served their community, but has also accessed the health care service.

I feel extremely lucky to feature Jake, a resident psychiatrist.

So I was hoping to start off the interview by just asking you to please introduce yourself and just tell us a bit more about how you got involved in the mental health advocacy space.

I'm in my third year of psychiatry residency training.

That means I completed college, four years of medical school, a year of MBA, master's in business administration, and now I'm in year three of four of my psychiatry residency training.

I make videos on social media, educating people about mental health, and I help reduce the stigma associated with doctors and other health care professionals seeking help for their mental health.

And I've grown a community of a little over 2 million followers and supporters across social media.

So I actually came across your videos when I was learning about the whole mental health advocacy space.

Would you mind sharing a bit more about sharing your own story?

Was that a little bit daunting in the beginning, or did that bring up any sort of emotions, or were you just from the get-go pretty open to doing so?

I guess I'll walk you through a little bit about my mental health journey.

What got me there basically, I started experiencing some symptoms of anxiety in medical school, but I didn't do anything about it.

I kind of grew up with mistaken belief that physicians don't really struggle with mental health, and that they can't or don't seek treatment for mental health.

I grew up with this kind of idealized vision of what a doctor is supposed to look like.

And I think I really believed that, and a large part of this is the stigma.

So I never really got help, and I wish I did.

In hindsight, I kept pushing, kept pushing.

A few months into residency, I experienced a real severe depressive episode for the first time.

And at that point, I'm a doctor who treats mental health, and I really couldn't recognize that I was experiencing depression until a friend of mine and also my wife had kind of told me, hey, I think you might be depressed.

It's hard to see it in yourself sometimes.

And ultimately, I decided to get help and get treatment.

I went to a therapist, and I went to a psychiatrist.

I started taking medication for the first time, and I started feeling a lot better.

Over the months, I would just get better a little bit every single day.

It sounded like I woke up the next day, and I was like, I'm cured.

It was more like weeks and months and months and months.

And finally, as I'm getting better, I'm thinking to myself, at this point, I probably had a million followers or 1.5 million.

And I'm like, I should post about this because I know that there are so many other people out there that could benefit from this that maybe are afraid of the stigma, just like I was.

If they could see that there's a doctor out there who's open to taking medication and who openly says to everyone, yeah, I'm taking medication, and that doesn't make me a worse doctor.

In fact, the fact that I'm seeking treatment to improve myself makes me a better doctor, better than I was if I was just to suffer through this depression without any help.

So, I decided to take a picture of myself with a pill in my mouth with a caption, I'm Dr. Jake, physician who treats mental illness, and I take medication for my mental health.

And that took me on a journey that I'm on today.

When I first saw that, as well, I just felt so inspired.

And seeing someone in the position where I hope to be being so open about this felt like, wow, someone really understands what it's like, and that there was a stigma in general in society.

But I wasn't quite understanding about the whole culture of mental health within the medical profession.

So, one thing I wanted to ask you was then, what is the culture like in terms of how accepting people are, their resources available, while you're already in the whole medical space?

I'll give a quick 30 second synopsis of where we came from.

So, I think people can understand how bad it used to be and how much better it is now.

So, residency training was really started, like the formal residency training that we know today was really started back in the late 1800s, early 1900s, by a guy named Dr. William Stewart Halstead.

He was a general surgeon out of John Hopkins, and he created one of the first residency programs, a formal residency training program.

And he worked his residents ungodly numbers of hours.

I mean, they worked 24-7, 365, really no days off or anything.

And because he really didn't sleep, he just worked and worked and worked.

And years later, it was discovered, uncovered that he actually had a substance use issue.

He struggled with cocaine addiction and would work extremely long hours under the influence of cocaine.

Now, he created this structure and it had spread throughout the country.

So, whether you were in Baltimore or you're in Chicago, this culture of work, work, work, work, work was already established.

And it wasn't until the 1980s when an individual died in a hospital due to a medical error made by a resident doctor working 18 hours straight that a work hour restriction was made.

That case was the case of Libby Zion in the 1980s, 18-year-old girl that passed away due to this medical error.

So, they created this 80-hour work week back in the 80s.

Prior to that, there was no work hour restrictions.

So, now we have 80-hour work hour restrictions, 80-hour work week.

There used to be really no restrictions on the amount of time that you could spend in the hospital.

Now, I'm not saying this is good by any means.

There's a limit of 28 hours in the hospital, which is horrible, but it used to be even worse.

And so, there's this culture of work till you drop and never complain.

And there's also a culture of not reaching out for help when you're struggling.

And that's due to stigma from colleagues and supervisors that if you reach out for help, maybe you're weak, you may be viewed as weak.

Stigma that we put on ourselves that, you know, we've worked this hard to get here, we don't need help.

But one of the overarching themes here is also a fear of what could happen if you reach out for help and see a psychiatrist or get mental health treatment.

And that fear is largely based on what will happen when you apply for your medical license.

Because when you apply for your medical license after college, medical school, residency, there's a bunch of questions on this form.

And one of those questions, in most states, in most states, there's a question regarding your mental health.

It may be something like, have you sought treatment for a mental illness?

It's some variation of a question like that.

And due to the fear of checking that box and somehow jeopardizing their medical license, many doctors in training, resident doctors, medical students, they never seek help at all, and they suffer in silence.

Although, and you know, this kind of brings us a bit to the solutions and how things are getting better.

There has been some major changes that are pushing the culture.

There was a physician named Dr. Lorna Breen, who was an emergency medicine physician who was really working on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic back in New York City, and she unfortunately passed away from suicide.