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 rigorous and life-consuming. Second, the residents feel like they don’t know what they’re doing, pretty much at all times.

The book’s 320 pages simply fly by as the reader becomes engrossed not only in the residents’ professional responsibilities but also in their personal lives. The focus is on Stern, but you learn about many of his classmates and their internal struggles as well. Even Rachel, the resident least upfront about her feelings, becomes a full character as you quickly begin to see cracks in the veneer. Some of Stern’s patients also become regular presences, and you feel the complex emotions Stern must feel as the patients come back to the hospital for further treatment: glad to see them, but anguished over the reason you must see them again. The reader shares deeply in Stern’s experiences, and that is what makes Committed one of my favorite books of the year so far.

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