How do I advise/support my sister who is a burnt-out PGY1 medical resident? (

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08/09/2025 20:05

Subject: How do I advise/support my sister who is a burnt-out PGY1 medical resident? (

quote

Anonymous

Hello. Please help!

I am not a doctor. I have a basic understanding of the medical field – it's structure, specialties, comp structure, how private equity is taking over hospital systems... and how it is increasingly treated as a service industry by patients/"clients", as well as the Gen Z evolution in culture (i.e. job vs. vocation).

My sister, who I will shamelessly describe as brilliant and an all-around amazing person, is a first-year medical resident at a university hospital in a large city in or between Washington and Boston.

She is 3 months in to her internal medicine residency and hates her job. She desperately wants to quit to become a high school teacher. (Context: she went to a "big three" NWDC private and I think that may be distorting her perspective of what being a high school teacher is; I myself went to a non-W MCPS public. Very different experiences).

For the physicians out here, how would you approach this? It's a confluence of:

1. Why am I working 80 hours a week for 60k a year??? (Inability to see long-term, which suggests to me, fatigue and burnout, and distancing from original mission to provide care);
2. Fear regarding making life-altering decisions and fear of liability;
3. Frustration with her patient population (a fellow resident was punched by someone who was overdosing, two weeks into her residency);
4. Anger at the state of the medical profession and how little control physicians have within large hospital systems, as well as the loss of respect for MDs with the rise of the NP/PA model;
5. Frustration that the hospital she works effectively doubles as a homeless shelter for the unhoused in her city, which, in her eyes, leads to needless testing and lab work, as well as ICU beds taken up by patients "without need" ("people come in pretending to have a headache so we end up running $10k+ of labs and a CT, when the next day they request to be discharged and confess they really just needed a place to sleep");
6. Some amount of pressure from her fiancé, whose mother was a stay-at-home mom and never worked (had kids young), so he projects a much more laissez-faire attitude towards the need to be an independent and professional woman, which was always very highly emphasized in my own home;
7. Exhaustion;
8. Refusal to see a therapist because her friends and family should be there for her. Well... we're not a medical family and have little context to provide on that score. And, obviously, we do not have the objectivity that a therapist would have; and
9. Refusal to explore rematching to an "easier" specialty (e.g. derm) because "that's not real medicine".

How would you go about addressing this as a brother or loved one? I've heard and held, but at this point, I'd like to help in some capacity. "It gets better" is not going to cut it, I don't think. Specifically asking from parents or siblings who have had a close or loved one in a similarly stressful position, or physicians themselves.

P.S. Yes – DCUrbanMom does indeed now have the adult children of original DCUrbanMoms posting on this site. Talk about coming full circle!