Even Psychiatrists Feel Like Impostors
A review of Adam Stern’s brand new med-school memoir *Committed: Dispatches from a Psychiatrist in Training*
Think about what you do. Do you often feel like you’re hanging by a thread, just waiting for someone to find out that you have no clue what you’re doing?
This feeling, often called impostor syndrome, is extremely common among parents, teachers, writers, bakers, lawyers, and even doctors. It’s common among every class of people you can imagine. And that theme, of feeling like you don’t belong in the place where you find yourself (and that it could all fall apart at any moment) is a major theme throughout Adam Stern’s new memoir, Committed: Dispatches from a Psychiatrist in Training. Stern set out to write about his experiences in medical school while training to be a psychiatrist, and he writes in-depth about what it was like for him and for the members of his class of residents at Harvard Medical School. It’s Grey’s Anatomy with a psychology twist if you want an easy description. But it’s so much more than that.
Committed describes Stern’s experiences through all four years of his residency program, and the reader begins to understand two concepts intimately. First, the training that psychiatrists-in-training (and any resident doctors) go through is…
