Ron Ruskin is a psychiatrist-writer and associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto.
When I was a junior psych resident, my big fear was committing a colossal medical error—administering the wrong drug, giving an incorrect dose, failing to make the right diagnosis, or not being wise or clever enough to save a patient from death.
Psychiatry, in my mind, is both an imperfect science of human behavior and the observed narrative of a human life; it offers expert medical knowledge to treat mental illness, and yet on another level, exposes the patient’s intimate suffering to the physician in a shared relationship. In our work of understanding, each of us is prone to fail, to misunderstand ourselves and the other.
What patients and teachers have shown me, despite my youthful ideal to be error-free, is that we learn more from failure than from success. Last week, my junior psychiatric colleague failed an oral exam; he was dismayed yet acknowledged his examiners were right—a critical question was omitted—one he will never again forget to ask. As he told me this, he laughed sadly at himself, not to deny his error, but to share his all-too-human vulnerability. Viktor Borge, the comedian, once said, “Laughter is the closest distance between two people.”
Laughter brings us closer together at times of loss, of tragedy, when we recall the poignancy of our work and our life. My fictional short-story “Why Don’t You Please Get Out and Leave Me Alone?” (Intima, Spring 2021) is about an unsettled junior psychiatric resident called to see an ICU patient the same age as himself who has shot himself in the head, taciturnly preferring to be left alone. The story is tragic and bittersweet as we see the resident awkwardly persist in asking the patient why he shot himself.
In a more recent story “The Oral” (Intima, Fall 2022) a second-year medical student, torn between reading poetry rather than pathology, stays up late cramming for his pathology oral exam, convinced by his persuasive pathology lab partner with a sure-fire hot-tip that “atherosclerosis” and not “cirrhosis” will be on the oral exam. The hot-tip, of course, is wrong. In both stories the reader is left with a disconcerting all-too-human sense of individual vulnerability with a touch of humor to add some light to our darkness.
Ron Ruskin is a psychiatrist-writer and associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto. He is a founding editor of Ars Medica, a journal of medical humanities, and has published three novels, co-edited two texts, and several short stories.