Last Updated: Sep 25, 2024
Growing up in a medical family, Mona Syeda Masood, DO, always knew she would become a physician.
“My parents really valued medicine, and that was an inadvertent encouragement for me,” she said. “They valued medicine as more than just a career – for them, it had much more meaning. It was the reason they moved to this country with a new lease on life and a catalyst for change.”
However, Dr. Masood was more interested in the humanities of medicine than the science of it.
“What drew me to medicine was less about science and how the human body worked, but more about the humanity of human beings. We have all these processes within the human body that are similar, yet as individuals, we are very different,” she said. “What makes that individuality? What makes us that way, and where is the intersection between us?”
The psychiatry specialty answered those questions for her. After completing her residency at Temple University Hospital, Dr. Masood now practices in Bucks County.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, she saw that humanity in her co-workers and started a physician support line to allow physicians to call anonymously and talk to a psychiatrist about their anxiety and fears.
“It wasn’t necessarily a sudden need, but it was finally a time for physicians to admit they needed help,” Dr. Masood said. “I saw it as an opportunity to not only address physician mental health but to begin a movement that would lead to long-term outcomes for the betterment of physician mental health.”
It started with a simple social media post.
“I was seeing in my physician social media groups that everyone was talking about the pandemic and feeling overwhelmed by it, so I put up a post of my own calling on fellow psychiatrists who would be interested in starting a support line for physician colleagues as they navigate this uncertainty.”
Within two days of the post, she had 200 volunteers nationwide wanting to help. Admittedly, she didn’t know where to start and did her own research to obtain a toll-free phone line, figured out how to set it up so that it connected to volunteers around the country, and contacted expert friends who helped with Good Samaritan laws to draft policies and procedures.
“I had no clue what would happen,” she said. Her highest volume of volunteers reached 800 psychiatrists.
Four years later, the hotline is still going strong for physicians in need, even if the pandemic isn’t the number one concern.
“The need was there prior to the pandemic,” Dr. Masood said. “As a psychiatrist, whenever I’m trying to build support or awareness in my patients, I look for that window of opportunity. You can tell people all you want that they could benefit from some help and therapy, but they need to be willing to hear it. I think during the pandemic, that’s what happened – physicians and health care workers were finally willing to hear it.”
Although it was her initiation of the support line, she says it couldn’t have worked without the volunteers who signed on for the position. “This didn’t just come from me; it came from a mutual coming together and understanding that we need to act. It was something everyone was noticing but needed permission to finally address.”
“We have a shared experience as physicians,” she said. “I want my colleagues to know they’re not alone.”