The Expectation That Went Missing

The feeling of being triggered is unlike anything else.It may vary from person to person, but my version is like watching a stone burning from the outside. I recognize something wrong is happening inside, but I can't grasp what exactly is going wrong, nor where those feelings come from. All I managed to do was keep

my distance from the potential cause and pray for the storm to pass.

Calming down, I gradually remembered what I had been thinking just before that.Can I learn to trust others the way I once did? Can I build a career in the field I want to dedicate my life to, with this mental instability? Were all my commitments in vain, causing nothing but a burden for myself? These questions do not derive from comparison with others, as is common in general mental health discourse. They come from looking into the future, just as anyone does. On a positive note, those questions are a sign of healing, as I couldn't think of anything like that during the most affected time. Spending the day, following the timetable of the day was enough. But now, the outlook for the future, which every final-year medical student faces sooner or later, throws such hard questions at me. And the implication is so deep: The very environment I'm suffering in now is where I should start serving as a physician in the upcoming year.

 The advice you may hear a lot in mental health topics is to seek help. The problem is who I can turn to, who would understand the multiple layers of my life. The potential cause of mental health issues in medical education, in my case the depression, is not all about academics. The school culture, the expectations from peers, the mismatch between your interests and those of your peers in the vast field, extracurricular activities, and heavy reliance on the relationship between the faculty and students... to name a few. These characteristics, though intended to produce competent physicians or to provide better educational opportunities, end up having a negative impact on us. The professional characteristics of medical schools make seeking help feel like a risk we cannot afford to take. And yet, here I am, writing this. I would love you to know you're not alone.