He doesn't take the mentor role lightly, realizing that the time students spend with him will influence their views of medicine. “Whether they like what you do or they dislike it, it's going to affect the way they shape their personality and their career in the future,” he said.
His primary challenge in accommodating students is the emergency department's tight quarters. Often it gets crowded, “not for me but more for the nurses and other people in our office,” he said.
Dr. Aaflaq noted that opportunities for mentoring exist regardless of where you practice or what field you're in. “You can mentor medical students, PA students, or high school students,” he said. “Sometimes, we get students from law school who need to be introduced to medicine because it's part of their schooling.”
If you reach out to nearby schools to let them know of your interest in providing a mentoring experience, “it won't take long before they contact you and ask you to volunteer,” he said. “I've been enjoying it since I started, and I probably will continue [mentoring] for as long as I'm practicing.”
Promoting Public Sector Psychiatry
Being a mentor “goes way back,” for Dr. Mary Ellen Foti, a psychiatrist who has practiced in the field for more than 20 years.
“There's a triumvirate of direct clinical care, research, and training that most of us adhere to,” said Dr. Foti, medical director of the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, Boston. “You do some of all of these things all of the time wherever you are.”
Currently, Dr. Foti mentors postgraduate fourth-year psychiatry residents who have an interest in developing careers in the public sector and working with persons who have serious mental illness. Residents who are chosen for the position spend 8–12 hours per week in the department of mental health's central office for a year, learning about leadership in public sector psychiatry and shadowing Dr. Foti.
“I take them to committee meetings or board meetings, [and] other kinds of things that I normally would go to,” she said. The training focuses on inpatient public sector psychiatry, work “that can be very grueling,” she said. “It's a high energy output every day. You do get the gratification of seeing patients do well, but it's very tough. How do you feed yourself? Where are the wellsprings of refreshment? That's where a mentor can help, a mentor who allows the person to talk about it, to reflect on [his or her] own experience.”
Dr. Foti also mentors early career psychiatrists in the public sector who are out of training but are trying to figure out what they want their niche to be. “They're wondering, 'How can I make my work on a daily basis more interesting? I have so many clinical patients but I have so little time. I really want to teach. I want to do some research. I want to make it more multidimensional,'” she explained.
The way she sees it, mentors are people willing to take a special interest in someone who is “a little bit or a lot” farther behind them in their career development. “There may be anxieties, like 'should I take this rotation or that, or should I take this job or that job,' but it's not like they're coming to you with an anxiety disorder that needs treatment,” Dr. Foti said. “You're not treating them. You're not teaching them. You're helping to support them to try different things, make opportunities available to them that they would not have known about, and encourage them to see beyond the job that they're in.”
Mentoring means being supportive during professional setbacks as well. It's challenging to watch mentees, “fall … and fight back the urge to say, 'I told you that probably wasn't a great idea,'” Dr. Foti said. “You can't do that. You're there to hear what they're thinking about doing, suggest additional options in the menu, help them to choose if they ask you to, and then, it's information only, nothing about what you think would be better or not better for them personally.”
That's the kind of approach Dr. Aaron Lazare took with Dr. Foti when she was a third-year medical student at the University of Massachusetts, Worcester. Dr. Lazare, who chaired the medical school's department of psychiatry at the time and is now the school's chancellor and dean, spent an hour with Dr. Foti in his office, sharing his vision of the department and the medical center. “It was an extraordinary experience being the mentored one,” Dr. Foti recalled. “He gave me something that was very important. He modeled for me what mentoring is all about.”