From the emergency room to the TEDx stage, Pamela Buchanan, MD ’05, shares her story and personal journey with overcoming mental health struggles as a physician.
Last year, I stepped onto the TEDx stage to share a deeply personal story—one that I believed would resonate not just with healthcare workers but with anyone caught in the crosshairs of a high-stress profession. My talk, “Emotional Flatline,” emerged from years of experiencing my own struggles and witnessing those of my colleagues as we navigated the physical and emotional demands of medical practice.
The term “emotional flatline” wasn’t just a catchy phrase—it came from countless nights in the emergency room, where I found myself becoming increasingly numb to both the highs and lows of intense patient care. In emergency medicine, we pride ourselves on handling any crisis that comes through those doors. What we don’t discuss enough is the silent toll this takes—how that constant state of high alert slowly chips away at our emotional reserves.
This message eventually struck a chord far beyond what I’d imagined. Healthcare workers from across the country began reaching out, sharing their own stories of burnout and emotional exhaustion. Their experiences convinced me that this conversation needed to take place more openly, which led me to expand my “Emotional Flatline” talk into a book on this important topic.
For over two decades, I’ve practiced medicine across diverse settings—from bustling emergency rooms to the quiet halls of primary care and correctional facilities. While this path has brought incredible rewards through deep patient connections and the privilege of helping others, it’s also shown me a reality many healthcare professionals know too well: burnout.
The pandemic brought these challenges into sharp focus. The book delves into my personal journey through COVID-19, but it’s about much more than just my story. It’s about every healthcare worker who showed up day after day, facing unprecedented challenges with dwindling resources. It’s about the nurses who held iPads for dying patients, the respiratory therapists who worked double shifts, and the residents who learned medicine in the most challenging circumstances imaginable. Most importantly, it’s about how those providing care must also learn to care for themselves.
Just like the airline safety demonstration tells us to secure our own oxygen mask before helping others, prioritizing ourselves isn’t selfish—it’s essential. Through practical strategies for reclaiming time, setting boundaries, and honoring our needs, I encourage people to break free from the myth that self-sacrifice is the only way to care for those around us.
My work with healthcare professionals now includes coaching through what I call the “3 Rs of Renewal”: Pause and Reflect, Reset with Rest and Reconnection, and Realign and Take Action. This framework emerged from my own experience and helps guide others back to the passion that first drew them to medicine.
As an ambassador for the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes Foundation, I’m also deeply committed to addressing physician suicide and the mental health crisis in our profession. Having known too many colleagues pushed to their limits, this work feels especially meaningful.
Emotional Flatline isn’t just my story. It’s the story of so many healthcare workers who were asked to keep going, often without adequate support, while facing new levels of exhaustion and trauma. But more importantly, it’s a story about finding our way back to feeling—back to the passion that brought us to medicine in the first place.
Looking back, I see how self-care has threaded through every stage of my career, even when I didn’t recognize it. By sharing these experiences and insights, I hope to help create a healthcare culture where wellness isn’t just something to check off of our daily task list—it’s prioritized and practiced. Together, we can work toward a future where healthcare providers feel empowered to care for themselves first, knowing that’s the only way we can truly care for others.
Pamela Buchanan, MD ’05, alumna of Adtalem Global Education’s Ross University School of Medicine, is a fierce mental health advocate and has been a board-certified physician in private practice and emergency medicine for 19 years.
In her TEDx talk—Emotional Flatline—Dr. Buchanan chronicles her time working in the ER during the COVID-19 pandemic, which led to her own struggles with depression and suicidal thoughts. Her difficulties in obtaining care encouraged her to become more engaged in raising awareness about—and finding real-world solutions to—our nation’s mental health crisis.
For more information, email the Adtalem Global Communications Team: adtalemmedia@adtalem.com
