Mental Health and Wellness

This category contains reflections on how students maintain their mental health in school and deal with the stress of burnout.

Ervin Anies, MD Ervin Anies, MD (4 Posts)

Resident Physician Contributing Writer

Walter Reed National Military Medical Center

Ervin (Erv) is beginning his general intern year at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and recently graduated from the Uniformed Services Univerity of the Health Sciences in May 2022. While in medical school, he was the co-director for the on-campus peer-led curriculum aimed to foster conversations about diversity, bias, discrimination, and inclusion in both medicine and the military. His interests include medical education, promoting diversity, and utilizing the arts to augment the healing nature of medicine.




The Ward as Medicine

The Ward as Medicine is about how one’s fellow patients on the psychiatry ward can act as mirrors, teachers and inspirations to a patient. Specifically, it is about a mom who, hospitalized for suicidality stemming from her guilt and anger over how she has mothered her children, gets reconnected with the identity of motherhood while interacting with others on the unit.

Changes

Medical student Saud Rehman has written a collection of poems focusing on the lockdown of March 2020 with artwork to give a visual representation of how he felt. Often times the manifestations of moods unrelated to coursework go overlooked, especially in medicine, and Saud hopes that these provide a representation of the humanity behind students going through difficult times.

Micaela Torres Micaela Torres (1 Posts)

Medical Student Contributing Writer

Charles R. Drew/UCLA University of Medicine and Science

Micaela is a first-generation medical student at the Charles R. Drew/UCLA Medical Education Program interested in surgery. She completed her undergraduate degree at UCLA and MPH at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her experiences growing up in a low-income, medically underserved community motivate her to advocate for equitable surgical care. In her free time, she enjoys listening to music and reading.