Medical students see mentors as marauding monsters

This comic by Alex Burton is an example of the type of work created by fourth-year medical students in the Graphic Narratives course at Penn State College of Medicine.

In a December 2015 study in JAMA, Daniel R. George, PhD, and Michael Green, MD, MS, faculty members in the Department of Humanities at Penn State College of Medicine, described the results of the Graphic Narratives class they teach at the College.

The two said students imagined the workplace as a dank dungeon and represented supervising physicians as fiendish, foul-mouthed monsters and themselves as sleep-deprived zombies walking through barren post-apocalyptic landscapes.

The study by George and Green referred to only 66 fourth-year students who had taken the Humanities class between 2009 and publication, but was shared in the same JAMA edition as a much larger study showing that nearly one-third of more than 17,000 medical residents in 31 studies screened positive for depression or depressive symptoms.

Read the full NPR article on these studies here and see the JAMA article here.

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