How Do You Feel? with Dr. Jessi Gold
This week, I’m excited to share an exclusive interview with my friend Dr. Jessi Gold. I previously interviewed Dr. Gold about how to talk to the media.
Dr. Gold is the Chief Wellness Officer of the University of Tennessee System and an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.
She is a fierce mental health advocate and highly sought-after expert in the media on everything from burnout to celebrity self-disclosure.
In her clinical practice, she sees healthcare workers, trainees, and young adults in college. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (with a degree in anthropology), the Yale School of Medicine, and the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry, she spends her free time traveling with her friends, watching live music (especially Taylor Swift) or mindless television, and on walks with her dog, Winnie.
Her new book, How Do You Feel?, is available everywhere books are sold today.
What inspired you to write this book?
The book is part-memoir, part patient-narrative. All the patients are healthcare workers or healthcare worker-adjacent. I’m one of the patients and you follow me going to therapy. I feel very much like I have become a burnout expert through work, but despite that, I didn’t necessarily apply it to myself.
I burned out pretty royally during the pandemic in the context of being a psychiatrist who sees frontline workers, working from home and being an extrovert, being single and being by myself in my house a lot. I didn’t actually think of it as burnout, despite the fact that I spend all day telling everyone else they’re burned out.
As therapists, we don’t stop to actually ask ourselves how we’re doing.
How does burnout impact private practice owners?
It’s hard to think about getting more people to see you when you’re burned out, right? It runs counter to a productive business for a lot of reasons.
For one, you need extra energy to promote your practice. Two, to promote means more people need you, which means more capacity. And, many people already feel full with what they have and administrative tasks, too. Burnout gets in the way of growing a practice.
What’s something you want therapists to take away from this book?
I hope they realize they’re allowed to have feelings about work. We’re allowed to be human and do the job. If I was a patient, I would want my therapist to take care of themselves, too.
I would want to know that when I’m dumping on my therapist, they have an outlet for that. It’s healthy and it should be encouraged for us to be human. Our life sometimes makes our work hard, too. It’s not just that work makes life hard. We can acknowledge that as well.
We’ve been taught not to self-disclose and we’re supposed to be this blank slate. I don’t really believe that. I have feelings. I have a life. I’ve had personal experiences. Sometimes, patients notice more than you realize, and I think there is room sometimes to be vulnerable.
How do you feel about marketing?
I hate it! It’s not something we were taught to like to do because you have to emphasize things about yourself that feels counter to what we’re taught about self-disclosure. Is it narcissistic that I’m self-promoting?
For me, I’ve had to process that in therapy. I’ve probably spent months and a lot of money discussing how much I hate self-promotion. What I’ve learned is that at the core of it, if you’re promoting something beyond yourself, you can stick with that for the meaning and purpose behind it. Yes, you’re building a practice, but you’re building a practice to help people.
I wrote a book to help people and I believe very strongly in the content of the book just like a therapist believes very strongly in their ability to do their job well. If you ground yourself in that, then it becomes a lot less uncomfortable.
I’ve also learned that authentic self-promotion is better than doing the traditional way of doing it. There’s a way to do it that feels aligned with my values. Sometimes it even helps serve as a way to check me and my mental health, because if I am marketing, and don’t feel right about it in the context of my life, that shows—and all of it suffers.
How do you think about consistency when it comes to marketing?
If my socials were entirely self-promotion, then I would have a really hard time. It helps to balance self-promotion with health education and research.
When it comes to consistency, it’s part of my job. It’s annoying to think about it like that, but I need to post a certain number of times per week. So you just have to make time for it, whether it’s every week or every month.
What was the process for getting your book published?
I wrote a query letter which is a 1-2 page letter about what I wanted to write about and who I am. I sent that letter to agents. I met with agents and got an agent that way all the way back in January 2021. They take about 10-15% commission, but they do a ton of work without any guarantee of money which I found interesting.
I worked with the agent on a book proposal. It’s non-fiction so I didn’t need to write the whole book. I just needed to write an outline with a few chapters, and I had to write why I was the right person to write it and who I knew who could help promote it. That felt sort of weird, honestly, but they want to make sure you have some built in promo—I’ve heard it is hard to sell a book without an existing social platform. With fiction, you have to write the whole book up front.
My agent shopped the proposal around to publishers. I didn’t have an amazing time with that aspect. I think I ultimately only had two actual meetings. Everyone said “she’s an amazing writer but it’s too niche of a topic.” I also put some boundaries around my own “trauma dumping” for lack of a better word. People really like memoirs to be juicy. But, I am a psychiatrist and I have to have some boundaries there.
We sold the book to an imprint of Simon & Schuster called Simon Element and to a particular editor there and together we basically rewrote the entire proposal. We ended up making it way more narrative, more about my story and my patients’ . The whole process has been about three and a half years, which is a long time. But, it’s out officially today—so it is real!
It’s a big endeavor and I’m proud. Now people need to see it and buy it, so I hope it doesn’t crash and burn.