Embrace the Journey
Medicine is more than finding a diagnosis. It’s more than treatment plans or conversations with patients. Medicine is being open to any avenue that might better our patients’ lives. There are too many times when you’ll tell yourself, “There’s got to be another way. There’s got to be more we can do.” Dr. Jake Goodman seems to ask himself this question daily. Jake continually embraces opportunities to help patients inside and outside the walls of the hospital.
Today, he uses all aspects of his life to change the culture of mental health. While his journey has carried millions with him to TED talks, the White House, and so much more, do not take those results as a strict roadmap you must follow. Jake’s journey has been so incredible because he allows it to go where it will. When you throw away the roadmap and allow your passions to dictate direction, the journey becomes something worth embracing.
Meet Jake
For those of you who don’t know, Jake is a jack-of-all-trades. He is currently a third-year psychiatry resident, an MBA graduate, and a prominent mental health activist through social media. To top that off, he is a loving husband to his best friend whom he met on his first day of medical school. For all of you starting school soon, keep your eyes open. Maybe you’ll find them there too :)
Everyone in medicine remembers the moment when they knew they wanted to be a doctor. For me, it happened when I was 19. For Jake, it happened before he was 9.
“I’ve always known. I remember going to my pediatrician and wanting to stay longer after my appointment. I wanted to see what happened in all the rooms because I couldn’t believe people could walk in sick and walk out fine. I honestly believed doctors were superheroes, so I started to chase that dream.”
I may be biased as a future pediatrician, but I couldn’t agree more. Medicine is extraordinary, and once you catch its bug, it’s hard to shake it. The seeds were planted for Jake that day, and they’ve been growing ever since.
The Setbacks
It’s easy to look at where Jake is now and think the destination was inevitable, but his journey was anything but straight. Repeat takes at the MCAT, multiple years of applying after college, and 20+ rejections were only some of the roadblocks he faced. To keep the dream alive, he worked plenty of odd jobs like being a caterer, bartender, and even driving Uber.
“I needed money, both to get by and to keep pursuing my dream. Applying is expensive, and the denials kept coming. It was embarrassing. I would see people from high school or college, or even pick them up as their Uber, who knew I was pre-med and would ask me things like, ‘I thought you were going to be a doctor?’ I had to keep telling people I didn’t get in, but I will one day. When I finally got that acceptance call, I was working in a bathroom as a technician. I just dropped to the floor crying. It was one of the greatest moments in my life.”
Throughout the denials, Jake held strong and kept fighting. Of course, doubts would occasionally pop up. How could they not? If any of you took multiple attempts to get in or are in the midst of re-applying as you read this, I know you’ve been told things like, “Are you sure you want to keep doing this?” or “Maybe it’s time to stop, have you considered trying something else?” or even “Maybe this isn’t for you.”
Jake heard his fair share of these phrases too. It’s not that these sorts of statements are coming from a bad place (hopefully). They’re usually coming from a place of love. It’s hard to have someone you love keep failing and see the toll it takes. Whether it’s medicine or some other dream, it can be challenging for those on the outside to understand how another path simply isn’t an option. When you want something that badly, it doesn’t matter how long it takes to get it. Sometimes, that makes getting there all the more precious.
The Roots of Psych: Work & Self-Care
While Jake didn’t start med school with psychiatry in mind, mental health was always an interest. He has long practiced meditation, studied sleep and dreaming, and even worked at a methadone clinic. There he saw people hit rock bottom and prevail, and he learned how vital each member of the mental health team was to keep patients safe.
“Psych ended up being my first rotation, and you could say roots took hold. I kept an open mind through everything else, but my mind kept returning. I had fallen in love and knew I wanted to keep going with it.”
What makes Jake’s story even more poignant is that after finally achieving his dream of making it to medical school, he began experiencing worsening mental health issues. At the time, though, it was hard to point out the signs. I think many of us in medical training can sympathize with that. We’re so used to going and going, focusing on everything except ourselves. When we finally get a moment to rest, we realize how we’re actually doing.
“When I look back, you can see times where like, oh yeah, that was depression. One way to think about it is how people ask someone if they’ve ever had a concussion. You might say ‘Well, when I was 16, I got hit in the head with a baseball, and the lights went out for a second or two, but that wasn’t a concussion, right? Oh, maybe it was...’ When I look back, I know for a fact in college I was experiencing pretty severe anxiety, but no one talked about mental health. I went to the student health center and said my heart rate is racing and I can’t sleep. I wanted to talk about thyroid disorders and getting blood when I should’ve been talking about my anxiety.”
Jake isn’t alone. Unfortunately, stigma around mental health runs rampant, especially within the medical community. It’s an absolute shame that as a field we don’t hold ourselves to the same standards and grace that we do our patients. Too many in medicine keep quiet about their mental health, dangerously residing to private coping strategies.
For a while, those strategies worked for Jake: meditation, yoga, exercise, mindfulness. Things got better. Then they got worse. That’s how mental health often works when you’re working alone. Depressive symptoms sparked as med school started, and anxiety skyrocketed. Yet, Jake didn’t seek help. Remember, doctors are superheroes, right? They don’t need help, or so we try to convince ourselves when it’s us that needs the help.
“If I just outwork the feelings, if I just kept working, they’d go away. I told myself that again and again, even as things got worse. Two months into residency, I was the worst mentally I had ever been in my life. Severe anhedonia, real depressive episodes, inability to sleep, low appetite, fatigue….you name it. I wasn’t myself. The world looked black and white like the colors couldn’t manage to get up. That’s when I finally went to a therapist for the first time. And queue the Rocky training montage.”
Today, Jake is in the best place mentally he’s ever been in, and it’s all due to taking that first step. Accept the help you know you need. This is a message Jake truly lives by, for himself, his work as a physician, and his advocacy through social media. Across platforms, Jake consistently breaks down mental health misinformation and inspires others to seek the care they need. He doesn’t just say the words. He lives by them. Many of you may remember this photo:
At the time, Jake had roughly 1.5 million followers across social media. This was the first time Jake let his audience and the world know about his struggle with mental health. He’ll admit, it wasn’t an easy decision.
“I was scared. Stigma is real, and I was worried the second it got out I might be treated differently. Even though mental illness stretches across medical professionals, it’s still a risky subject to openly discuss. But people outside of healthcare feel those pressures too. I knew if I shared my story, there had to be somebody out there afraid of stigma or cautious about getting help, who might feel a bit more at ease to seek care. That’s why we do what we do. We try to pave avenues that make it easier for patients to find help. I had that post saved as a draft for months, just kept looking at it and talking it over with my wife. I have her to thank for giving me the final push. Everything changed after.”
The post went viral, and importantly, for positive reasons. People were generally grateful to see someone in medicine stand up and say, “Hey, I struggle too. I went and got help, and today I feel stronger for it.” Jake showed the world you could be a physician and seek mental health treatment. Since then, he’s found himself in a bit of a paradigm shift, surrounded by more compassionate conversations and vulnerability for people all over the world.
Social Change & Responsibility
Let’s talk about Jake’s work across socials. What started as a small outlet has garnered a cumulative audience of 2 million people! His authority in the field of psychiatry paired with his story of vulnerability has generated a platform to guide others through their mental health journeys. Sometimes witty, sometimes serious, and sometimes a mix of the two, Jake’s content regularly tackles stigma, misinformation, and medical education. You may have seen his short films illustrating the dangers of long-call. You may have seen his TED talk or his trip to the White House to speak on the state of mental health. I’ve even had the pleasure of working alongside him on his “POV: You’re the Doctor” series. There, we’ve created med ed vignettes from film & television (or built them ourselves) to turn foreign concepts into public knowledge.
If you’ve been following the blog, you’ll know I’m often curious to see how a public identity affects the other aspects of one’s life: friends, family, and even clinical practice.
“I would say having this platform has taught me an invaluable skill that I never could have received in medical school: how to educate the average person on medicine. We have to remember that most of the world isn’t in the medical field. Their trips to the doctor can be fearful and stressful. The process of creating my content has taught me how to break down complexities into their most basic forms so that anyone stopping by can gain something valuable.”
When Jake and I were speaking, we did a quick rundown of how many total views and interactions he’s received since starting: over half a billion. That’s half a billion opportunities to help someone, teach someone, or lead someone to care. It’s hard to put into words the power for good that provides.
“In today’s age, I believe engaging in social media is a necessity to do all we can for our patients. How many lifetimes of being a physician would I have to live to see 1/100th of those [half a billion] in clinic? Of course, the help they receive online isn’t nearly equal to what we as physicians can provide in person, but a clinic room doesn’t have the power to educate the masses. How many of those people have no access to mental health care? How many of them have realized from these videos that their ‘normal’ could be drastically better? I treat each video and each view as if it’s one’s only opportunity to learn.”
Jake went on to say while having a public platform does introduce unique challenges inside the hospital, it also offers unique blessings. He has had countless experiences with medical students thanking him for everything he’s done to change the culture of training. His work not only helps students feel comfortable to work alongside him, but the enthusiasm they then bring to their learning will have rippling effects for training and patient care to come.
The Journey Continues
What’s next? How many times do we ask ourselves that throughout our medical journeys? It’s so easy to plan our lives five, ten, twenty years out. We’re in a field that’s defined by delayed gratification, so that kind of thinking is baked into our training. When you step back, though, it can be a pretty destructive mindset. Constantly planning and adjusting for the forever-shifting future makes it hard to enjoy the present we’ve fought to get to.
“I’m figuring out what’s next for me. I don’t know what for sure, but hopefully I’ll never no 100% for sure. That’s the joy of it all. I’ve spent too much of my life trying to plan my future, but it never works out how you draw it up. And while you’re busy drawing, you’re missing out on a lot around you.
I never thought I’d publish a children’s book in residency, but that happened! If I had to stick to a strict plan, I would’ve missed out on something special. I was just thinking one day, ‘Wow, I really wish a doctor would have opened up about mental illness when I was a kid.’ I could’ve really used that. There’s almost no education for kids on mental health, and I realized I could help that. I wanted to create a book that taught mental health concepts to young people, illustrated and engaging, that introduces them to things like depression and what you can do about it. That it's okay to talk to somebody about your feelings and going to a doctor is a sign of strength.
That one experience has already brought me so many incredible memories, and I could’ve missed out on all of it if I didn’t allow my future to shape itself. Maybe I’ll build a practice. Maybe I’ll turn my platform into something new. I don’t want to know what the future holds, I want to enjoy the journey to get there.”
I think we could all stand to adopt that mindset. If you are happy with where things are, and you embrace changes as opportunities, the future shifts from this state of anxiety to a pleasant adventure.
I’m in awe of what Jake has done. I’m not talking about the numbers. I’m talking about what they represent. Mental illness is everywhere. Most everyone either deals with their own struggles or knows someone who does, yet something so ubiquitous to the human experience is simultaneously shamed. Stigma stands in the way of so much healing, which is why we need people like Jake to reframe the conversation. His audience represents the need we have for answers and guidance.
Thank you so much Jake for taking the time to share your story. Go follow along @jakegoodmanmd on Instagram and TikTok for all the amazing things he is doing! It’s been such a joy following your journey and all you do for others. I can’t wait to see what you do next, but I’m glad you’re not rushing to get there. Keep embracing the journey, and keep healing.
More by Tyler Beauchamp at www.tyler-beauchamp.com
Follow @_tylerbeauchamp for his latest news and stories
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