400th Post! This Psychiatrist was Admitted to Inpatient Psychiatry

A story from 2013, about your author, when he was a resident physician.

Welcome to the 400th post of the Frontier Psychiatrists Newsletter. I have been writing this more or less daily since July 1, 2022. I met my wife almost 10 years ago. That was about two months after the events described in this article.

Still, in August 2013, I was a third-year resident physician in the Donald and Barbara Zucker Hofstra-Northwell School of Medicine General Psychiatry Residency Training Program at the Zucker Hillside Hospital. That is the real name. I was engaged to be married. I started getting depressed at the beginning of my third year—July—and it got so severe that I walked myself into an inpatient unit—this time, as a patient. It was not in the hospital in which I worked, although, in retrospect, I might have been okay with that. It was in another hospital in the same health system. It was a difficult time, and I learned crucial lessons about what that locked door feels like when you don’t have the keys.

I will tell more of this story over time because self-…