MCAT tips for those of us dealing with mental health issues

Mental health problems can take the already-very-difficult-and-stressful MCAT experience and launch it to a whole new level of shittiness. Whether it’s anxiety that keeps you from doing practice problems because you’ll get them wrong, depression that makes it difficult to even pick up a pencil, or any number of other things, mental health presents a unique and stubborn barrier to making it through the MCAT. Most of those type A success-story people you see on MCAT online forums and YouTube videos will never understand how this feels. It sucks, and it’s real easy to feel helpless when you’re in your own personal mental hell and no one seems to understand.

I found myself in this situation while I was studying for the MCAT, and I was able to figure out some steps that helped me keep going in a way that circumvented my own challenges (mostly paralyzing anxiety).

1. Take a breather. When you’re studying, you might feel like you have to be on track 100% of the time, and you’ll be pressured to study constantly by the sheer amount of stuff on the test. But it’s important to remember that you (yes you) are bigger and more important than your test result ever will be. So take a day or two off, or however long you need to get your head on straight. Another way to think of this is that you’re most likely not going to get any effective studying done at this point anyway, so the most productive thing you can do is make some space to reset so that you can get back to work in a better way. Go do something for yourself (milkshake? Hike?), even if it’s the same thing you did for yourself yesterday and the day before. You’re allowed to! You’re taking the freakin’ MCAT, which is metal as fuck.
2. Try and figure out what is tipping off your spiral/episode. While you’re taking a breather, you can think about what exactly put you off track and why. For me, this was the scaled score I got every weekend after my practice test. I found that I wasn’t getting the upward trajectory I wanted, and each successive score would push me over the cliff into a really bad place. You don’t necessarily have to psychoanalyze yourself at this point, only try and pinpoint the moment you first felt yourself sliding. Then…
3. Find out how to avoid doing whatever it is that puts you in a bad place. There’s no reason why you should have to do something that makes it more difficult to keep going. If all your episodes happen while you’re studying at 4 pm on Sunday, go watch a movie at that time. If it happens after you talk to a particular person about the MCAT, avoid the topic around them. If it’s caused by something in your study plan, make a new study plan that works around the bad spot. I found out I could simulate the testing experience without getting the scaled score that hurt me so much, so for the last two practice weekends I took the unscored sample MCAT and a makeshift exam made from AAMC section bank questions. That took away the stimulus for my episodes and made reviewing my answers more bearable.

Remember that this whole process is about getting you ready for the MCAT. And that the “you” in that statement is just as important as the “MCAT.” It’s not about changing yourself to become what the MCAT wants you to be. It’s about getting the knowledge that you will need to take flight and thrive during med school. It’s about getting you through the process intact, so that you can bring your perspective to the medical world. We need as many lovely unique perspectives as we can get in medicine, because this diversity reflects the lovely unique people we’ll be caring for. The Princeton Review and Kaplan and whatnot cater to a specific often-successful way of thinking. They teach all of us to think a certain way. But if we all thought the same way, we’d be terrible at helping people with an infinity of embodied experiences. We need mental diversity in medicine. When you make space for yourself in the MCAT curriculum, you’re not just helping yourself make it through the test. You’re bringing your own perspective to the medical field, where it may one day help someone else thrive.