From MuslimMatters.org: Dr. Mansoor Malik is a professor of psychiatry at John Hopkins. For most of his career, his work has been what you’d expect from a clinician-educator at a major academic medical center: healthcare worker wellbeing, peer support programs, minority physician mentorship, geriatric psychiatry. He helped build the RISE program at Hopkins, a peer support model for clinicians in distress. He trained residents. He published on burnout and resilience. He served as president of the Washington Psychiatric Society.
Then Gaza happened, and Dr. Malik turned his scholarly attention to a question the profession was not ready for: what happens to the people who watch? The clinicians, the observers, the professionals in institutions that issue statements about human rights, while looking away from the largest assault on a healthcare system in modern memory. He started writing about moral injury, the guilt and shame that come from witnessing atrocities your institution refuses to name, and about what he describes as moral invalidation: the mechanism by which institutions deny suffering not by disputing its existence but by deciding that naming it is more dangerous than the suffering itself.
