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by Ashley Kate Bourne (Author)
Resident, Interrupted is my story of what it really means to become a doctor-and what it costs along the way.
On Match Day 2024, I opened an email that changed everything: You did not match any position. Psychiatry, the specialty I had dreamed of, was suddenly out of reach. Instead, I entered a transitional year that tested every part of me-my endurance, my marriage, and my mental health. What followed were sixty-hour weeks, the deepest depression I had ever known, and the shame of pretending I was fine while quietly unraveling.
But I also found resilience in unexpected places. In patients fighting for their lives in the ICU. In children navigating trauma in foster care. In transplant candidates waiting for hope. And in myself-when Lexapro, therapy, and the support of loved ones helped me climb out of the darkness.
This memoir is both a personal reckoning and a look behind the curtain of medical training. I write about the quietly cruel culture of residency, the stigma around physician mental health, and the small rebellions that helped me survive. Alongside patient stories, I share my own-of breakdowns in hospital stairwells, nights when I almost gave up, and mornings when I finally felt the fog lift.
Now, as a psychiatry resident, I can say that survival was never the end goal. Becoming whole again was.
For readers of Atul Gawande's Being Mortal and Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind, this book is my truth: unpolished, unfiltered, and human.
