You’d think they’d be the most confident people in the world. Highly educated, accepted into institutions that keep out most people who want to get in, looking forward to a life where they’ll be respected and listened to and well-paid for it, too. They’ve got every official stamp of approval the world gives people like them.
But no. About a third of medical school students feel that they’re “a fraud and not worthy of their achievements.” They fear they won’t get through medical school, much less become good doctors. These students suffer from imposter syndrome, according to Arthur Lazarus, a medical school professor writing on the MedPage Today site.
‘Fake it till you make it’
Lazarus felt that way when he was a student, he explains, and many of the med school students he’s taught over the last four decades felt that way, too. They suffer from anxiety and depression at much higher rates than other people, and many consider suicide.
It’s a “fake it till you make it” culture, says Pamela Wible, a doctor specializing in the psychology of doctors. “They pretend to have all the answers, and they have learned to become masters of disguise, lying not only to patients and other doctors, but also to themselves — for example, lying about their mental health by concealing substance use and suicidal ideation.”
Many students apparently feel this way even after they become doctors. About one doctor dies by suicide in America each day. “Many doctors who kill themselves appear to be the most optimistic, upbeat, and confident people.” Wible writes. “Turns out some of the happiest people — especially those who spend their days making other people happy — may be masking their own despair.” Doctors “are masters of disguise and compartmentalization.”
That’s sad, and reason to pray for your doctors — and nurses, who face the same stresses. The doctors and nurses we see give us their game face. They know we need to feel they know what they’re doing. But inside, many feel differently.
Unrealistic expectations
Many Christians suffer from imposter syndrome. And probably for most of the same reasons, including the pressure they feel to live up to the name and the way other people expect them to be better than they are. And they’re usually as good as doctors are at hiding their real feelings. Which makes them feel even more like imposters.
I’ve had a couple painful discussions with people who couldn’t escape the feeling that they were such failures as Christians that they thought they had to abandon the whole thing. (I’ve had more painful discussions with people who thought they were God’s gift to himself.)
They didn’t understand St. Paul’s insight when he writes in his letter to the Christians in Rome that “We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold into slavery to sin. What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate” (Rom 7:14-15). I think it is one of the most comforting passages in Scripture. But other people don’t. They seem to feel they ought to do better than the apostle.
Catholic realism
We have God’s official stamp of approval, but sometimes feel we don’t, because we don’t deserve it. Our friends and neighbors may think we’re good Christians, because they see us being nice and going to church and doing churchy things, but we know that God who sees the heart knows how half-hearted our faith can be. Some Christians wind up spiritually crippled by this feeling, and a few seem to fall into despair.
I don’t have any pastoral advice, not being a pastor, but I do think we need to be more consciously committed to what we might call Catholic realism. You love God, imperfectly but truly, and you keep sinning. You will live like this till you die.
You’re not an imposter. You’re just human. The God who created and redeemed you knows that better than you do and has made arrangements to help. We must be as realistic about God’s gifts as we are about our sins.
The badge of the servant of Christ
The Father has given you his Son and through him the Church, and her traditions and Scriptures; the saints as friends and examples; and the sacraments as food and medicine and teacher; and other Christians (and other people as well) as supporters, guides, critics, judges, encouragers.
“Others may look up to them, but they ever look up to God,” St. John Henry Newman said of the saints in one of his sermons. “The young and unspotted, the aged and most mature, he who has sinned least, he who has repented most, the fresh innocent brow, and the hoary head, they unite in this one litany, ‘O God, be merciful to me, a sinner.'” He called that feeling “the very badge and token of the servant of Christ.”
We are sinners who need God’s mercy, but God loves us and has given us the mercy we need. You should spend the rest of your life repenting, but not a second despairing. Your loving Father has this.
