By Shannon Turgeon
Photography by Rayni Shiring, University of Pittsburgh
Antoine Douaihy, a professor of psychiatry and of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, considers himself to be a “wounded healer.”
He adopted that identity after being diagnosed with polycythemia vera, a rare blood disorder, in 2022.
Shortly after beginning treatment, Douaihy underwent a routine variceal banding procedure; days later, an unexpected complication caused severe, uncontrollable bleeding. He fell into a coma and required more than 40 units of blood and urgent vascular reconstructive surgery to save his life, which led to a months-long hospital stay.
As he recovered, he began talking, thinking and writing about his experience, motivated by a desire to delve deeper into accepting illness and embracing his own healing process.
“I never really thought about it as a process to help other people,” he said. “I needed to disclose what I was going through because I felt that it was going to be cathartic, as painful as it could be.”
After two years of writing and editing, Douaihy published his book, titled “Rethinking Illness: A Psychiatrist’s Near-Death Reckoning with Healing and Healthcare" in November 2025.
In it, he tells his narrative of illness and recovery by incorporating personal anecdotes, art, literature, philosophy and spirituality, along with illustrations by School of Medicine graduate and current UPMC psychiatry resident Alex Talbot.
Douaihy now feels that the lessons he learned from his journey could benefit not only patients and family members, but health care practitioners as well.
Although he had positive interactions with his own health care team, his illness—and personal experience going through medical school and later, mentoring students and residents—displayed to him the importance of keeping humanism at the forefront of medical care.
“As a health care practitioner, you are supposed to be trained as an empathic healer with technical skills. But you're also human, and you need to learn how to meet patients at that level. I noticed that there is too much emphasis and focus on ‘OK, what can we do to fix that?’” said Douaihy.
Douaihy is also working to share what he has learned with current health sciences students. On Feb. 24, he collaborated with the School of Nursing’s Nursing Students Association to hold an interactive literary discussion where he read excerpts from his book and spoke to future nurses.
“One of the things I hope people can take from sharing my own experiences—with illness, my emotional struggles, my ups and downs, the joy, sorrows, loss, uncertainty and grief—is that it would make them think more about their patient care skills,” he said.
“Those skills should involve being present with the person first and foremost, not jumping right away to wanting to fix the problem. You might be the expert in the technical and mechanistic aspects of the disease, but you’re not the expert on what the person is going through. The only way you can understand what the person is going through is by deeply listening and being present and being very mindful.”
Douaihy plans to continue speaking to health care practitioners, students and the wider community to encourage challenging conversations inspired by his experience of illness. On March 28, he will be sharing his story at the TEDx event in Pittsburgh.
In the meantime, he is applying what he has learned throughout his journey while treating patients as an addiction psychiatrist and mentoring medical students and residents.
“It was a huge learning lesson for me. It made me appreciate more what it means to be empathic with people, what it means to be compassionate with people, and what it means to be expressing loving-kindness with patients that I work with,” he said.
“Illness is a wakeup call that brings new ways of living, meaningful connections, reassessing values, regaining faith and self-discovery.”