By Stephanie Gardner, Pharm.D., Ed.D.

This speech was delivered at the Mehta Awards event.

Good afternoon – I am pleased to welcome you to the awards ceremony for the Drs. Paulette and Jay Mehta Awards in Creative Writing. 

This is the second year for these awards, made possible by the generosity of the Mehtas and their love of the arts. These awards speak to their belief in the ability of creativity and the arts to nourish our spirit, to cultivate lifelong learning, and to guide us to becoming better health care providers. 

As we find more ways to integrate the arts into health professions education – whether it’s the written word, visual art or music – I believe we are equipping our learners with a powerful tool to help them form deeper connections with patients, maintain joy in medicine and develop empathy and resiliency. 

Personally, I love to read. I read for pleasure and to learn. I also enjoy talking about what I am reading and currently belong to two book clubs – including the Provost’s Book Club that I started six years ago. The book club promotes collegiality on campus as we discuss books related to personal and professional development, along with patient care, education or research.

The Mehtas have been avid participants in the annual book club since the start. This year the club read In Shock, by Dr. Rana Awdish, a physician who suffered a catastrophic medical emergency seven months into her first pregnancy that resulted in the death of her unborn child and left her fighting for her own life through massive internal bleeding, septic shock and stroke. She survived the long ordeal but was moved to share her journey due to multiple episodes during her treatment and subsequent return to work where she experienced or observed a shocking callousness or lack of empathy by health providers or colleagues – such as when a nurse tried to guilt her into holding her unborn child’s lifeless body. Through this, she believes it is important for a physician or health provider to acknowledge and empathize with a patient’s pain and experience and that it is possible to do without depleting yourself or clouding professional judgement. 

She writes: “When we allow our human channels to remain open, we better understand emotion because we’ve bravely confronted our own. Only then we can see where we are needed and the spaces we must move to fill. Only then can we help each other pass through the storm intact. Only then can we understand the value of our presence in the storm.”

When we encourage our learners to read a story like this, we introduce them to examples of the moral choices and dilemmas they may encounter as clinicians in a way strengthens empathy and allows reflection and productive discussion. We also are encouraging them to share their own ideas and experiences, much like Dr. Awdish did, so that we all may benefit from their creativity and perspective. 

Using the arts as a medium for growth, emotion and the exchange of ideas goes right to the heart of humanity and of these awards. 

Paulette, Jay – thank you for creating these awards.

By Paulette Mehta, M.D.

Dr. Mehta delivered this speech at the 2022 Mehta Awards ceremony.

We’re glad to see so many friends in the audience and in the video stream, all of whom have come to celebrate creative writing and medicine and the Mehta creative writing award contest.

Doctors have a long tradition of writing and some of the most famous writers are doctors; for example,  Sir Conan Arthur Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes; Somerset Maugham, the English author; Anton Chekhov, the Russian playwright, William Carlos Williams, American poet; Viktor Frankel, the German concentration camp survivor who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, Robin Cook, creator of adventure stories; Michael Crichton, creator of Jurassic Park and many other doctors.

Why do doctors write? There are probably as many reasons as there are doctor-writers but I believe there are three main reasons: they write because they can; they write to understand their relationships with their patients and their worlds; and they write to heal themselves and give meaning to their life.

Let me explain.

First, they write because they can. They are privy to and present at the most sacred and intimate moments of life from the moment of birth to the moment of death and everything in between including disease, pain, suffering,  treatment, and hopefully resolution, remission,  cure, often all within a single day.

They are there…in those intimate moments, in the center of the drama, witnesses to the human condition and the vicissitudes of life. 

Physicians and other healthcare providers also write to understand their patients and the worlds in which they live which may be very different than their own. Patients come to us, their doctors, with diseases for which we have many medicines but they also come with stories: the stories of their lives, of their struggles, of their journeys. They expect us to hear their stories, to interpret their stories, to share their stories, to give meaning to their stories and thereby to help them heal.

But we also write to heal ourselves and give meaning to our own lives.  Many of us healthcare workers  suffer from burnout and related distress, often without even knowing it. Burnout relates to proximity to pain and suffering, death and dying, hopelessness and helplessness as well as long hours, hard work, pressure to perform, lots of typing, and sometimes insomnia from work, stress and worry.

In studies done here at UAMS, 50% of doctors, nurses and scientists were shown to have evidence of burnout. This is similar to data from other centers.

But in the UAMS studies, Messias and others found an antidote. 

The single most important protective factor against burnout was meaning in one’s work. 

Creative writing is one way to find meaning by exploring issues — by getting them out of your head and onto the paper where you can look at them, interpret them, and give them meaning. 

I suspect that people who do creative writing or any creative work for that matter have happier and healthier lives but I have no proof.

The practice of creative writing, story hearing and storytelling is one component of narrative medicine which can be practiced side by side with biological medicine.  It adds to biological medicine by reconnecting medicine with humanism and reintegrating art and science in the practice of medicine.

We created this award to help healthcare providers write for whatever the reason they choose. We hope that it will stimulate creative writing and give meaning – and joy – to healthcare providers and to their patients and their colleagues alike. 

We are delighted to see that we have already fostered so much interest with so many submissions last year and again this year. We applaud all of the people who submitted work and we congratulate those who have won first place and honorable mention prizes for their submissions and look forward to the readings. 

Please know that the work of all of the winners will be published in this special summer supplement to Medicine and Meaning, the UAMS literary journal. Please watch for the announcement for that issue, please enjoy tonight’s program, and please stay for the reception.

Thank you all for being here.