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Cover of "A Prescription for Burnout" by Carolyn Roy-Bornstein, MD, featuring a centered fountain pen on textured paper with blue strokes.
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A Prescription for Burnout

Restorative Writing for Healthcare Professionals

Carolyn Roy-Bornstein, MD
Publication Date

A compassionate guide to writing your way back to purpose for healthcare professionals.

Physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals are leaving medicine in record numbers due in large part to exhaustion, disillusionment, and a profound loss of joy in their work. In A Prescription for Burnout: Restorative Writing for Healthcare Professionals, Carolyn Roy-Bornstein, MD, offers a powerful, science-backed remedy to burnout in the healthcare field: reflective writing. This guide is a structured, compassionate companion for those who want to stay in the profession they once loved and renew...

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A compassionate guide to writing your way back to purpose for healthcare professionals.

Physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals are leaving medicine in record numbers due in large part to exhaustion, disillusionment, and a profound loss of joy in their work. In A Prescription for Burnout: Restorative Writing for Healthcare Professionals, Carolyn Roy-Bornstein, MD, offers a powerful, science-backed remedy to burnout in the healthcare field: reflective writing. This guide is a structured, compassionate companion for those who want to stay in the profession they once loved and renew their sense of purpose.

The book is organized around the three dimensions of burnout identified by psychologist Christina Maslach—emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and a perceived lack of efficacy. Each chapter introduces a focused writing practice to help clinicians reconnect with their values, strengthen empathy, and rediscover meaning in their work. Dr. Roy-Bornstein brings more than three decades of experience as a nurse, pediatrician, and narrative medicine educator to this deeply personal and practical work. She knows firsthand how writing can transform grief, trauma, and professional disillusionment into clarity, self-awareness, and healing.

These evidence-based and insightful exercises are designed to be brief yet sustaining antidotes to the pace and pressures of modern healthcare. Whether used privately or in groups, in early training or late-career reflection, A Prescription for Burnout offers clinicians not just strategies for surviving the system but tools to reclaim their voice—and their vocation.

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Reviews

Reviews

In A Prescription for Burnout: Restorative Writing for Healthcare Professionals, Dr. Carolyn Roy-Bornstein has written a meditative and practical book on what writing is good for. Finding the right words to tell the story, explain the self to oneself, create order out of confusion, clean the room of the mind—all can be, she reminds us, as beautiful, as satisfying, and as healing as a Mozart sonata.

— Victoria Sweet, University of California, San Francisco

This is a deeply personal and also practical step-by-step approach to writing for people whose profession is healing others and who are looking to writing as a way to understand and care for themselves.

— Perri Klass, MD, author of The Best Medicine: How Science and Public Health Gave Children a Future

Warm, wise, and practical, this book is a potent and effective prescription for doctors and nurses burned out by the depersonalized healthcare system and still reeling from the extraordinary stresses of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

— Suzanne Koven, MD MFA, author of Letter to a Young Female Physician: Notes from a Medical Life 

A Prescription for Burnout is a highly insightful and meticulously researched blueprint for incorporating creativity into one's daily life.

— Jacob M. Appel, author of Who Says You're Dead? Medical and Ethical Dilemmas for the Curious and Concerned 
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Publication Date
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Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
208
ISBN
9781421454733
DOI
Subject
Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Section One: Addressing Emotional Exhaustion
Introduction
1. Writing for Physical Health
2. Writing as Opportunity for Self-Reflection
3. Writing to Bear Witness
4. Writing

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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Section One: Addressing Emotional Exhaustion
Introduction
1. Writing for Physical Health
2. Writing as Opportunity for Self-Reflection
3. Writing to Bear Witness
4. Writing as the Heart's Back Door
5. Writing as Trauma Narrative
6. Writing to Build Resilience
7. Writing to Increase Self-Awareness
8. Writing to Develop Our Professional Identity
9. Writing for Mindfulness
10. Writing as Gratitude
Section Two: Countering Cynicism
11. Writing to Listen
12. Writing to Improve Our Powers of Observation
13. Writing to Strengthen Our Relationships
14. Writing to Gain Perspective
15. Writing to Enhance Empathy
16. Writing as Self-Compassion
17. Writing to Foster Self-Confidence
18. Working for Work-Life Balance
19. Writing Toward Optimism
20. Writing to Set an Intention
Section Three: Restoring Self-Efficacy
21. Writing to Find the Wisdom Within
22. Writing to Cultivate a Sense of Wonder
23. Writing to Regain Our Sense of Agency
24. Writing to Flourish
25. Writing to Unleash Creativity
26. Writing to Increase Tolerance of Ambiguity and Cultivate Openness
27. Writing for Connection
28. Writing Toward Joy
29. Writing Toward Meaning
30. Where Do We Go from Here? Writing as a Way of Life
About the Author

Author Bio
Featured Contributor

Carolyn Roy-Bornstein, MD, FAAP

Carolyn Roy-Bornstein, MD, FAAP, is a board-certified pediatrician and the writer-in-residence at the Lawrence Family Medicine Residency program. She is the author of Through Thick and Thin: One Foster Family's Eating Disorder Journey and Crash: A Mother, a Son, and the Journey from Grief to Gratitude.

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