Ep. 16- Laurel Braitman/Learning Empathy Through Writing

For the last few years, Laurel Braitman, has been teaching writing and communications skills to medical students and doctors at Stanford University, helping healthcare professionals connect more meaningfully with their patients, their peers, and themselves. Nearly 30% of American medical students are depressed and one in ten have thoughts about suicide. Practicing physicians are even worse off with some of the highest suicide rates in the nation. It's how we learn to communicate with one another that matters most. The most important thing we can do in the time we have here is connect with other people  and ideally, make them feel less alone. Laurel also studies we can learn from the emotional lives of non-human animals, including her New York Times bestselling book, Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves helped us see how we can learn a lot from our non-human animal counterparts.