The Student, the Patient and the Illness

The essays for the Ascona Balint Award give a deep impression of the students’ experiences, reflections and conclusions. And they show an insight into medical education in different countries.

“It was through reflecting on my experience with Laszlo that a more uncomfortable truth came into focus. There exists another kind of responsibility; One that does not come with protocols, checklists or assessments. It cannot be memorized nor can it be numbered. This responsibility lies in holding space for emotional care alongside practical care, recognizing that the two must work in tandem. Medicine cannot be separated from its core purpose.”
Jood Ghunaim

“Listening to him, I began to understand that his body was not merely expressing psychological distress, nor failing in isolation. It had become a territory in itself, bearing the marks of a broader devastation. His pain, his fatigue, his insomnia were not private symptoms but inscriptions of a collective wound, where individual suffering, communal loss, and territorial destruction collapsed into a single experience.”
Pedro Henrique Docema Rodriguez

“I imagine a system where, after such an encounter, I could go to a mentor and say, “He spoke of Vietnam and nightmares and his wife and son, gone within weeks of each other. I feel out of my depth. Can we think together about what I have opened and what can be offered now?” I imagine a ward where there is space to hand over not only blood results but stories, where the psychosocial wound is acknowledged as something the team shares responsibility for, not something smuggled into a spare moment by a student.”
Sepanta Sadafi

With contributions by Jood Ghunaim, Iben Armann Jeppesen, Jasmine Liew, Julia Carvalho Lima, Amit Manor, Barok Marom, Spartan Nandal, Yunis Alexandre El Jaroush Palhavan, Pedro Henrique Docema Rodrigues, Sepanta Sadafi, Tess Wheeler and Fabiana Benedini Galli Zambardino