Using the Arts to Heal the Healers: A Narrative Medicine Approach to Self-Care for Clinicians

Here’s the advice I share with my pre-med students: By all means, be a doctor. But don’t ever marry one. And definitely don’t marry an ER doctor!”

And yet, I did both. I’ve questioned those choices at various points in my lifetime, and my most recent mid-life crisis (because, let’s face it, there have been several) happened during Covid. It was not that long ago that those of us giving care in the hospital truly thought we might actually die. Sadly, some of us did. My husband would come home from his shift in the ED, strip down in the laundry room and immediately shower. We’d head to the back porch (away from the kids) and we’d drink hazy IPA that we’d ordered online, and I would cry. I cried because I worried he wouldn’t come home from his next shift. I cried because I feared for my two young boys that I didn’t want to get sick. I cried because they had cancelled my OBGYN contract at the hospital due to resource constraints. And I cried because I had to figure out how to become a home-school teacher for a kindergartener who needed to learn how to read. What in the hell was I going to do? I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be a doctor anymore!

It was at that time that I found an online program through Columbia University called “Narrative Medicine” and decided to apply. Narrative Medicine is hard to define. The Columbia website offers, “Narrative Medicine is an international discipline at the intersection of humanities, the arts, clinical practice, and health care justice with conceptual foundations in narratology, phenomenology, and liberatory social theory.” Which is a mouthful. 

In essence, I like to think of it as a practice in noticing. Students ask me, Noticing what? I tell them, Notice more of everything. Narrative Medicine hones skills in close-reading and close-listening through examination of the arts. It then teaches us how to cross apply those skills to clinical encounters, or other important relationships. At that point in my life, Narrative Medicine started letting in some light when it felt like a lot of doors were closing. I learned how to apply those skills of Noticing to the self, shedding light on which things were really important to me and which things I could let go of. Examining what I truly wanted to accomplish with my life, instead of what I was doing because it was expected of me. Ways to clean out old rooms and make space for new things. Noticing what it felt good to say “yes” to, and what if felt good to say “no” to. I learned how to examine the world around me in fine detail to learn how to better examine myself.

Studies show that utilizing creativity breeds wellness on multiple levels (1-2), and multiple studies also show that creativity and Narrative Medicine practices can prevent burnout among clinicians (3-7). It shouldn’t be surprising, really, but since us doctors like scientific studies, I’ve listed a few for you to peruse below.

When people are creative, they are working in the present – an act of mindfulness that engages parasympathetic systems – slowing heart rates, lowering blood pressure. And, when people are creative, in whatever way, they feel connected – to each other, to nature, to the human experience. And connection is one of our most primal needs – just ask any psychologist what happens to a person (or an animal!) who gets kicked out of their respective tribe or pack. It is detrimental to health. In some greater sense, human beings need to feel connected to the world around them. And in many, many ways, we do this through art. We share – we share photos on Instagram, we share playlists and podcasts, we go to movies together, art shows, we eat together, and point out sunsets.

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Brené Brown writes in Atlas of the Heart, “Both awe and wonder are often experienced in response to nature, art, music, spiritual experiences, or ideas. In the midst of these moments, we can feel overwhelmed by the vastness of something that is almost incomprehensible…. Even seeing things we may fail to notice on a regular basis, like a starry sky or a butterfly in a garden, can stop us in our tracks on occasion. Both awe-inspiring events and the experiences that leave us filled with wonder often make us feel small compared to our expansive universe. Small, but connected to each other and to the largeness itself.”

Before medical school, I used to dance.

Before medical school, I used to write.

I had lost touch with both of these experiences due to my studies in medicine and in the craziness of parenthood that immediately overlapped. And I hadn’t even noticed how devastating it was until Covid happened, and I realized how lost I was. I had lost myself, and consequently lost purpose. I didn’t like practicing medicine and I wanted to run away.

In the years since Covid, we have now begun to recognize and define my experience as “burnout”. This was not a phrase that was ever used when I was in medical training, and certainly not the generation before mine. But it is a phenomenon and a force to be reckoned with, it affects about half of physicians (8), and it will cause any number of “mid-life crises” if you let it. Physician burnout rates are improving, but we are still 82% more likely to experience burnout than other professions (8). Throw in skyrocketing litigation rates in the U.S., low reimbursement rates, crazy work and sleep hours, limited leave time for family or rest, and you end with a group of people who all signed up to “help others” and are drowning.

Narrative Medicine, creativity, the arts, and nature all offer pathways for us to experience awe and wonder, and to re-connect with ourselves, with each other, and with the greater world around us. I developed (H)Arts in Medicine to offer a platform for people, and specifically clinicians, to reconnect these pieces of ourselves to become whole again. If any of this story sounds familiar to you, I hope you might consider some of our offerings that vary from simple one-hour online haiku workshops to our weekend-long (H)Arts and Wellness Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Because our hearts need more than just medicine and exercise to stay healthy.

Note: As an exclusive benefit for Offcall's members, Sophie is offering a special discount for the upcoming CME-accredited Clinician (H)Arts and Wellness Conference in Santa Fe in August 2026! Learn more details here and if you enter OFFCALL100 when you register, you'll get $100 off of the conference registration!

• Clift S. (2012). Creative arts as a public health resource: moving from practice-based research to evidence-based practice. Perspectives in public health, 132(3), 120–127. https://doi.org/10.1177/1757913912442269
• Stephenson, K., & Rosen, D.H. (2015). Haiku and Healing: An Empirical Study of Poetry Writing as Therapeutic and Creative Intervention. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 33(1), 36-60
• Engel T, Gowda D, Sandhu JS, Banerjee S. Art Interventions to Mitigate Burnout in Health Care Professionals: A Systematic Review. Perm J. 2023 Jun 15;27(2):184-194. doi: 10.7812/TPP/23.018. Epub 2023 Jun 12. PMID: 37303185; PMCID: PMC10266839.
• Mangione, S., Chakraborti, C., Staltari, G. et al. Medical Students’ Exposure to the Humanities Correlates with Positive Personal Qualities and Reduced Burnout: A Multi-Institutional U.S. Survey. J GEN INTERN MED 33, 628–634 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-017-4275-8
• Karpavičiūtė, S., & Macijauskienė, J. (2016). The Impact of Arts Activity on Nursing Staff Well-Being: An Intervention in the Workplace. International journal of environmental research and public health, 13(4), 435. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph13040435
• Gowda, D., Columbia Narrative Medicine, Webinar: Enhancing Well-being through Visual Arts in Health Professions Education. January 15, 2025
• Tjasink, M. et al.(2023). Art therapy-based interventions to address burnout and psychosocial distress in healthcare workers – a systematic review. BMC Health Services Research, 23:1059
• American Medical Association 2025 National Burnout Survey, May 2025