mental health | Dr. Valerie Brooke 2/2

Valerie Brooke, MD

Jan 31, 20223 min read

Personal and Professional Perfectionism

To be perfect means to be “excellent or complete beyond practical or theoretical improvement.” Perfectionism is multi-dimensional and can...

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Valerie Brooke, MD

Jan 23, 20224 min read

Moral Injury

The term moral injury popped into the conversation about physician burnout back in 2018, when an article was published entitled...

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Valerie Brooke, MD

Jan 16, 20223 min read

Balancing the See Saw

On the way home from skiing last weekend my husband and I were humming along to the familiar 1968 Moody Blues song, “Ride…Ride my…blah...

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Valerie Brooke, MD

Jan 2, 20225 min read

Doctors Don't Do Lunch

As part of my research on physician burnout, I have been reading books by other physicians who suggest multiple different strategies for...

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Valerie Brooke, MD

Dec 19, 20212 min read

Professional Accomplishment

In addition to emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, not having a sense of personal accomplishment is the third symptom of burnout....

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Valerie Brooke, MD

Dec 5, 20213 min read

Depersonalization

The meaning of depersonalization has always alluded me. How can one not feel like a person? I finally understood it when I experienced...

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Valerie Brooke, MD

Nov 28, 20212 min read

Compassion Fatigue

When I realized last year I was feeling burned out in my job as a physician, I dove into learning as much as I could about the symptoms...

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Valerie Brooke, MD

Nov 21, 20213 min read

Permission To Feel

I recently had an interaction with a patient that had suffered a stroke and it got me thinking about emotions. I was asking this patient...

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Valerie Brooke, MD

Nov 14, 20213 min read

Emotional Exhaustion

This was a vivid dream I had in August of 2020, after a 10-hour day of work, on day 4 of a 12-day stretch at the rehabilitation hospital....

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Valerie Brooke, MD

Jul 5, 20215 min read

Boxes and Boundaries

Many years ago, a wise therapist gave me some excellent guidance in how to stay sane while parenting a teenager. “Set up a box of...

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Valerie Brooke, MD

May 4, 20214 min read

My Magic Pill

I’ll never forget the PowerPoint lecture in medical school that taught us about a powerful medicine seemingly able to prevent and treat...

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