There’s a world of difference in how we see ourselves and how others see us. I’ve often been described as intense. I’m the kind of person who tends to come on too strong and speak (or write) too forcefully. Sometimes it’s considered a good thing, and I’m perceived as confident. Other times and with other …
Behind every joke, there’s smoke
There are few things more tedious than someone acting in bad faith. You see it all the time on social media. Person A posts and then some other Person B shows up in the replies attacking said tweet. Person A (or some other Person C) then points out how the attack is unfair, only for …
How uniformity kills unity
We tend to mistake uniformity for unity. Uniformity is about looking the same, while unity is about actually being one.This means that unity is internal: it begins with agreeing on some fundamentals as being most important and then working together to build in alignment with those fundamentals. Uniformity, on the other hand, is external: looking …
Dancing at work
One of the favourite parts of my job is when I get to dance with patients and their loved ones. Not literally of course. Read more…
Pain is life’s “cost of doing business”
Life is much harder if we’re convinced it shouldn't be. Pain comes to us all, but it lands much harder when we think of it as something we shouldn’t ever experience, and not simply as life’s “cost of doing business”. The reason for this lies in how pain works. Pain has two sides to it: …
Don’t turn from the dark side—of you
We often downplay our capacity for evil. We do it every time we explain people doing terrible things by insisting they must be ignorant, mentally ill or subhuman. And it's understandable: the darker parts of ourselves are—well, dark. Easier to turn away than face that head-on. But to turn from our dark side is to …
Words are a superpower
When I teach medical students on psychiatry posting I emphasise how important it is to avoid words that convey a dim view of patients. It goes back to a consultant’s advice during my own training. Consider the difference between: She claimed she hadn’t been using substances recently.She said she hadn’t been using substances recently. Same …
Good or bad? Wrong question.
We’re obsessed with hierarchies. We see thing A and thing B and instinctively wonder which comes first. It’s why kids argue about whose dad is stronger and fans about whether Batman or Iron Man is smarter. (For the record, the answer is always Batman.) Our minds are meaning-making machines—which means we will sometimes impose some …
Diversity isn’t for the “other” people
When you're on the inside, it's easy to think of diversity as mainly for the benefit of the "other people"—you know, so "they" get a chance to be in the room where it happens. That's a mistake. Diversity is really just the sensible thing if we have any self-awareness of our unavoidable bias. We often …
“Culture” is all the things we take for granted
I recently read a well-intended but naive suggestion: that people should explain their cultures to others new to it. If I’ve learned anything moving to the UK, it’s that none of us really knows our cultures. Not from inside. It takes someone breaking our cultural rules for us to even see them. Why is this? …
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