The Shame and Medicine Project is excited to be collaborating 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 Conversation, is creating an audio documentary storytelling series exploring the subject of shame in medicine, through YOUR stories.
Want to share a shame story (or stories)? Sign up here!
