GJ

How medicine has exploited rationality at the expense of humanity

I am an undergraduate at Barts and the London medical school and in March 2021, I undertook a Student Selected Component (SSC) in the role of creative arts in health and illness. Over the summer of 2021 I have been working alongside Dr Louise Younie on a NIHR internship.

The SSC was my first opportunity to choose my own module or project at medical school. I believe this had life changing impact on how I see both my own personal life and medical career in the future.

Early on in the SSC we were introduced to the idea of flourishing. This is the idea that through adverse experiences you can grow and learn . I had always felt that the term which is most widely used at medical school, ‘resilience’ was unsatisfactory as it represented more of a hardening of your position and in a way developing a kind immunity towards the tougher situations in life. Whereas after being introduced to the idea of flourishing I now have a new framework which I could now implement into my own day to day life. Personally, I’ve allowed this to frame how I look at everyday experiences and look at every aspect of life be it whilst at medical school or out of medical school. I have now become more appreciative of the day to day and use the idea of flourishing as an anchor in order to reassure me that every experience be it positive, negative, exciting or mundane in the moment is for greater growth in the bigger picture.

I also think that fostering a safe space for us to openly talk and communicate was essential in encouraging us to all feel comfortable in sharing opinions and deep thoughts with one and other. Speaking openly with my SSC group about many of the struggles of university life gave me a newfound confidence and hearing about shared worries helped to quell my own. I now felt much more in contact with these feelings and had the ability to share and convey these feelings with friends and family. Now that I could vocalise to other people around me it gave me a much better understanding on how I was feeling myself. I found that once I began sharing my feelings with people around me that it opened other people up to feel more comfortable to share how they were feeling with me. I specifically noticed this with my flat mates, I saw my relationship with them flourishing throughout the SSC and beyond. This could be boiled down to two reasons, the first of which is that I felt so passionately about the SSC course that I now felt compelled to share these experiences with my peers. Secondly, I felt a new sense of confidence, having shared such deep and meaningful experiences with people who had been strangers to me only two weeks ago and seeing how this allowed our relationship to flourish. I knew that I could now tap into something different with my flat mates and it showed me that no matter how different you think you are from people around you, that you can always find some shared interest. Our relationship changed from being merely people who co-existed in the same space to us sharing stories together until late into the night. I feel that my willingness to share or be more open was contagious and immediately elevated the friendships around me, allowing people to feel more comfortable and honest about their own lived experiences.