Finding Her Niche

Having majored in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and taken fewer science courses than her YSM classmates, Gold notes, “the beginning [at YSM] was a little bit rougher of a start for me.” However, she credits the administration with being very supportive, finding her a tutor and other help.

Also, Gold says, “I came in thinking … I like the brain, but I don’t want to be a psychiatrist, because my dad is a psychiatrist.”

Wanting to chart her own path, she decided to explore neurology instead and devoted the summer after her first year to research with mentor Serena Spudich, MD, an associate professor in the Department of Neurology. But despite Gold’s best efforts to dodge mental health studies, she ended up focusing her research project on depression in neurologic HIV.

Gold gradually warmed up to psychiatry, drawn to the storytelling aspect of it—exploring the social history of a person. With the help of psychiatry clerkship director Kirsten Wilkins, MD, and others, she came to understand her interest in psychiatry, how she fit within medicine, and how her interest in writing could be woven into a career, as a tool for advocacy.

She realized that there could be a special niche in this field for her, noting, “Yale helped me to see what different careers in medicine could look like and how you didn’t have to have a cookie-cutter career.”

A Focus on Students, Staff, and Health Care Workers

Gold decided to focus on helping others—groups familiar to her—with their mental health.

“I’ve always been an observant person who wants to fix the things that could have been better for me,” she says, noting that her own first experience seeking mental health care, in college, inspired her to want to improve that experience for college students and others. She wanted to make the experience helpful and not scary.

With the goal of helping university students, staff, and health care workers, Gold has undertaken a blend of clinical work, teaching, and leadership activities.

When the pandemic hit, Gold took on a leadership role—that of director of wellness, engagement, and outreach at Washington University in St. Louis. A key question she had asked her chairman led to the new role. She asked, “What are we doing for the mental health of our own?” He turned to her for ideas. She says, “I wrote the plan and helped build a clinic for faculty and staff, and also helped do a lot of education—giving talks in every department possible.” Her outstanding contributions during the pandemic were recognized with a 2023 Dean’s Impact Award.

Gold’s next career step came earlier this year. In February, she was appointed chief wellness officer for the University of Tennessee System. There she has been working to create a robust structure around wellness, including programming and support, across the university’s five campuses and over 62,000 students. And she also sees patients. Excited about the job, Gold is committed to making good use of her “superpower” to look at structures, find gaps, and connect with others across silos to find solutions.

Gold emphasizes, “I spend a lot of my energy on culture change.”

Contributing to the Discourse

Beyond her day-to-day job responsibilities, Gold communicates with broader audiences on mental health. She began with some freelance writing and then expanded into multiple forms of media, including social media. Her social following grew slowly but now stands at over 50,000.

She says that because people consume information on mental health from social media and journalistic sources, it is important for health care workers, such as herself, to be included. “Being in the mix to correct some of the misinformation, put out good information, and contribute positively to the discourse around mental health—normalizing and destigmatizing mental illness—is really important.”

Gold’s most recent foray in communications was writing a book. She was inspired to write it after she burned out heavily during the pandemic and did not even recognize the signs in herself. “My therapist had to tell me I was burned out, which is pretty embarrassing when you’re a burnout expert.” It led her to think about her and her patients’ similar experiences and what one could learn from that.

Gold’s book How Do You Feel? depicts her story and the stories of several patients and was crafted to help all health care workers realize they are not alone in their experience. It details some of her time at Yale and focuses on the hidden curriculum around feelings in medicine. Gold notes, “The ‘You’ in the title is the important part. We spend so much time asking people how they’re doing that we don’t actually ask ourselves.”

(To learn more or connect with Dr. Gold, you can visit her website, follow her on social, or reach out via email.)