"Dr. Roy-Bornstein has written a truly compassionate, engaging and inspiring book for all readers, but especially for healthcare professionals who may be struggling with burnout and fatigue. The book is full of terrific writing prompts and other practical ways to guide any reader to a more reflective place. Loved it!"

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

“Warm, wise, and practical.”
“A potent and effective prescription for doctors and nurses burned out by the depersonalized healthcare system and reeling from the extraordinary stresses of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
“I’ll be recommending it to my colleagues!”

“Truly outstanding.”
“A highly insightful and meticulously researched blueprint for incorporating creativity into one’s daily life.”
“The perfect salve for the mind craving intellectual or emotional adventure.”
“The work is bound to become a staple of physicians’ writing groups and professional school classrooms and would also make the perfect gift for family or friends working in clinical care, a retiring colleague, or for oneself!”

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

"I am excited to read A Prescription for Burnout by Carolyn Roy-Bornstein this semester in Lenoir-Rhyne University's Narrative Healthcare Program with fifteen amazing doctors, surgeons, chaplains, counselors, veterans, writers, and storytellers. This book embodies narrative practice. This book is the next level: the writing journey from anhedonia, paralysis, disenchantment of burnout and of moral injury back into a full life of joy and meaning. It is an amazing addition to the Narrative Medicine and Expressive Writing library. Really amazing work!"

This book is the culmination of a lifetime of care. Roy-Bornstein began her practice of reflective writing while caring for her son, who suffered a traumatic brain injury after being hit by a drunk driver. Her writing allowed her to heal her own emotional wounds and connect with others who'd suffered similar tragedies. Her journaling was how she made sense of her family's suffering. As Roy-Bornstein neared retirement from clinical practice, it felt natural for her to join a family medicine residency training program as a writer-in-residence. The role would allow her to deepen her practice and pass down what she had learned about writing's power to heal. Reflective writing had helped her weather incredible stress in own life, and now she felt it could help doctors-in-training endure all that they'd face practicing medicine in a broken system.
I resonate most with the attitude of care Roy-Bornstein brought into each chapter. Through the stories she shares, it's clear how her faith in the power of writing was born from her love for her children, her patients, and her students. And that attitude is also evident in her use of the first-person plural, which brings her into the trenches alongside the reader. She argues that nurturing skills through writing like self-compassion, mindfulness, and the capacity for wonder can only help in the struggle to maintain our inner resources in the face of all that seeks to drain them. This practice can strengthen our agency while we fight for structural changes to care delivery.
I can see how the prescriptions in this book could be a balm when my work feels especially heavy, a better means of self-preservation than any email I receive from my administration. I'll be sure to pass it along to colleagues who are struggling, especially those willing to engage with the deep emotional work it outlines.
in Hippocampus Magazine

A Prescription for Burnout is a gift for all healthcare professionals and even those who support them. As someone who is married to a physician and who serves physician families, I am thrilled to see a book like this. Those of us in the medical world or medical adjacent can feel the crossover effect of burnout as it extends well beyond the physician and the walls of the hospital. Thank you, Dr. Roy-Bornstein for a wonderful roadmap to restorative writing.

This was a fantastic book, both as a learning resource and as a validation of writing as a means of restoring us to our best selves, mentally and medically. As an experienced writing workshop facilitator who runs Writing as Healing workshops with staff of various medical groups, I appreciated this book's depth of knowledge as well as its personal touches. Dr. Roy-Bornstein is both expert in her field and relatable as a human being, and anyone with career-related burnout can get a lot from this book. I dog-eared so many pages, because I want to return to them often for guidance and inspiration. If I could give it 10 stars out of 10, I would!