The Shame and Medicine Project collaborated with The Nocturnists, a medical storytelling podcast and community to create an audio documentary storytelling series about ‘Shame in Medicine’.
Shame is everywhere in healthcare. We feel shame in our exam rooms and operating rooms, in our break rooms and board rooms, and in our lecture halls and anatomy labs. It rides with us on our commutes and follows us to our bedrooms and our dinner tables.
We feel shame through our mistakes, our self-doubts, our uncertainties, and our failures. We feel it through the bodies of our patients and our own bodies in the mirror. We feel it in our own physical and mental illnesses, our emotional distress, our vices and virtues, our desires and needs. We feel it in our attempts to “balance it all” and achieve perfection, which eludes us. We feel it in our learning environments, where it invades our pedagogies and seeps from our assessments. We feel it within our institutional cultures, which can make us wonder if we belong.
Shame is everywhere in healthcare, and yet — due to its taboo nature and the culture of silence that surrounds it — shame is nowhere in healthcare.
Now is the time to change that. The Nocturnists, in collaboration with the Shame and Medicine Project and The Shame Space, created an audio documentary storytelling series Shame in Medicine: The Lost Forest exploring the subject of shame in medicine, through YOUR stories. Drawing on the stories of over 200 healthcare workers across the United States, the United Kingdom, and beyond, this series explores how shame manifests in medical culture. Alongside each episode are resources to support you with tools and frameworks to have productive and transformative conversations about shame in medical culture.
Click here to listen to a clip from each episode.
Read about the Shame in Medicine: The Lost Forest exhibition at the British Science Festival 2023.
