Jillian Horton's memoir about her five-day Buddhist mindfulness retreat reminded me a great deal of psychologist Caroline Elton's book from a few years back--Also Human--which concerns doctors' personal struggles and mental anguish as they practise and sometimes decide to leave medicine. Initially strangers to each other, the participants who attended the retreat in Chapin Mill, New York along with Dr. Horton were similar to Elton's clients: doctors on the edge, all of whom were experiencing some degree of personal and professional "failure to cope."

Many physicians, Horton included, enter medicine for unconscious reasons, to right wrongs or address unacknowledged suffering in their own early lives. Horton's elder sister, Wendy, was diagnosed with a life-wrecking brain tumour in childhood. After surgery to remove the mass, Wendy developed meningitis, which further added to her brain damage. She was profoundly mentally and physically disabled, and the lives of all members of the Horton family essentially revolved around her care. Horton's other siblings also experienced great hardship. Her brother, Christopher, descended into psychosis in his teens. He spent the next twenty years--right up to the end of his life in 2020--in a psychiatric institution. Jillian's other sister, Heather, also had trouble making her way in life. She inherited the Lynch-Syndrome genetic mutation, and developed cancer. Jillian was supposedly the "lucky" one. But was she? In a way, she was scripted to save them all. A gifted and musically talented student, she didn't inherit the faulty gene, and would likely have succeeded in any number of careers. After gaining undergraduate and master's degrees in English literature, she won a full scholarship to pursue a PhD at Oxford, but she opted to attend medical school instead. Her memoir opens many years into her successful practice when she is experiencing debilitating burnout.

Horton tells many compelling stories about her training and her patients. She acknowledges that some of the reasons for her reaching a point of despair are personal ones, but that flawed, dehumanizing, competitive medical education also played a significant role. The idealistic, perfectionistic, and driven young people who train to become physicians are conditioned to become increasingly divorced from their own emotions. Working punishingly long hours, they also learn to disconnect from--and deny--such basic needs as sleeping and eating. They compartmentalize, too, closing off many rooms in their own psyches--rooms that hold memories of failures, mistakes, and shame. Horton's book explores how the retreat helped her to open some of those doors in order to understand how she'd ended up in such a dark place.

This is a brave book that humanizes doctors. I can't imagine putting myself "out there" in the way that Dr. Horton has. Having said that, I do feel her memoir is too long and repetitive. Trimming it by a third would have made it a finer book. I'll admit, too, that I'm not fond of first-person, present-tense, play-by-play tellings. I don't care to hear about giggles, chuckles, and who raised her hand to "share" at the retreat, so a fair bit of the text just felt like filler to me. I grew impatient reading page after page about mindfulness exercises, sitting and walking meditation, the group sharing, and the hugs and tears at the retreat centre. While I understand why Horton set the book over a period of five transformative days, I personally would've preferred a more conventional chronological approach. Horton's frequent free associations, under-the-breath quips, and sardonic asides also became somewhat tiresome to me.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for providing a free digital copy of the book for review purposes.