Lifestyle

'Survivor's guilt' is real right now in L.A.

Published

12 months ago

January 20, 2025

'Survivor's guilt' is real right now in L.A.

Los Angeles is a place that feels physically and emotionally fractured these days. For tens of thousands who are displaced, routine is a near impossibility. Others carry on with little visible change to their daily life.

Yet that doesn’t mean there isn’t a heavy inner struggle.

How do you grasp the fact that a sizable part of our city has been decimated, ravaged and left heartbroken while a significant majority remains untouched?

It is a confusing and paralyzing time, and it is, above all else, unfair. Smoke and ash are in the air, and so is survivor’s guilt, leaving many unsure how to act or grieve.

“Everything you say feels like it’s the wrong thing to say,” says Shannon Hunt, 54. Her central Altadena home is still standing while those nearby are not. An arts teacher, her place of work, Aveson School of Leaders, is gone.

“Every time I cry, every time I feel broken, I think I don’t deserve that, because someone else has it worse,” Hunt says. “That’s stupid, intellectually. I understand that’s not right, but it’s how you feel, because these other people have no baby pictures and no Christmas ornaments and they are people that I love. How can I complain?”

Survivor’s guilt, experts caution, will for many be the new normal. I have felt it, as a single thought has jolted my mind over the last two weeks when I’ve left my place: I don’t deserve this. I’ve attempted to go to spaces I frequent for solace but have left, as comfort and enjoyment, quite frankly, felt inappropriate in this moment.

It actually shows that you have a great deal of empathy. Most of us don’t want to express our suffering when others have suffered more because we don’t want them to feel bad. So it says something about us if we’re feeling survivor’s guilt. It says we care about people a lot.

— Chris Tickner, co-owner of Pasadena’s California Integrative Therapy

“You’ve hit the nail on the head there,” says Mary-Frances O’Connor, grief researcher and author of the book “The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn From Love and Loss.” “Survivor’s guilt is, in many ways, ‘I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve to have been spared.’”

O’Connor brings up a concept of “shattered assumptions.” The term, she says, “is something we use a lot in loss and trauma research” and deals with our everyday beliefs — how life, the world and people generally work.

“Events, like loss and trauma, shatter those assumptions,” O’Connor says. “It’s not that we never develop new ways of thinking about the world, it’s that it takes time to address questions like, ‘What do I deserve?’ The process of having to pause and consider those questions we didn’t have to do before, because there was no entire Los Angeles neighborhood burning down.”

Acknowledge what you’re feeling

Chris Tickner and and Andrea-Marie Stark are romantic and professional partners, operating Pasadena’s California Integrative Therapy. They’re also Altadena residents whose home survived despite, Tickner says, everything surrounding it being devastated. As therapists, they now find themselves in an odd position, attempting to process their grief and survivor’s guilt while doing the same with their clients.

First step, Tickner says, is to normalize it.

“It actually shows that you have a great deal of empathy,” Tickner says. “Most of us don’t want to express our suffering when others have suffered more because we don’t want them to feel bad. So it says something about us if we’re feeling survivor’s guilt. It says we care about people a lot, so much so that we’re willing to be stoic and not express ourselves.”

To begin to process survivor’s guilt, it helps, experts say, to not only be vulnerable but to acknowledge and do away with our instinct to concoct a class system of suffering. The initial step to take is just to better understand what is happening.

The L.A. wildfires are an impossible-to-comprehend catastrophe, and whether you were heavily affected or relatively unscathed, a sense of survivor’s guilt is to be expected. All of us, after all, are feeling loss given our communities and our city will be irrevocably changed. And yet our inclination is to carry on and be quiet. A friend even warned me against writing this story, wondering if it was “problematic” to admit I was struggling when I was not displaced.

“The reality is that so much tragedy is existing all the time,” says Jessica Leader, a licensed marriage and family therapist with L.A.’s Root to Rise Therapy. “Burying our heads in the sand saying, ‘Just focus on me,’ I don’t think is the right approach.”

The reality is that so much tragedy is existing all the time. Burying our heads in the sand saying, ‘Just focus on me,’ I don’t think is the right approach.

— Jessica Leader, a licensed marriage and family therapist with L.A’s Root to Rise Therapy

For one, it’s isolating. “Every single person, no matter what they’ve experienced, has started their session by saying, ‘I’m so lucky. I don’t have a right to complain,’” Leader says. “That is really rattling around in my brain. The collective experience right now — survivor’s guilt is seeping into every conversation that we’re having. It’s normal. But it’s also paralyzing.”

Turn your attention outward

Survivor’s guilt, says Diana Winston, director of Mindfulness Education at the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center, is a “constellation of feelings” — “despair, hopelessness, guilt, shame.” The longer we sit with them, especially shame, the more reticent we can become to discuss them. Winston recommends a simple mindfulness trick called the RAIN method, an acronym that stands for “recognize, allow, investigate and nurture.”

Consider it, in a way, as a beginner’s guide to meditation. “I think people, without a mindfulness background, they can work a little bit with RAIN,” Winston says. “‘This is what I’m feeling, and it’s OK to have this feeling. It makes my stomach clench and I can breathe and feel a little bit better.’ Anyone with a little self-awareness can do that.”

Just take a moment to focus intently on the last aspect, “nurture.” “A lot of people are feeling guilt, fear and panic, and what we can do is turn our attention out toward other people,” Winston says. “It tends to help people not be lost in their own reactivity.”

An exercise like RAIN also can help us articulate and share our emotions, which is integral. Don’t bottle them up. That can lead us into a nihilistic place of feeling as if nothing matters, or accelerate our grief to the point it becomes a part of our identity. Dwelling on things, Leader says, can inspire a resistance to letting go, of feeling guilty if we are not living in our memories daily.

O’Connor says to think of what grief researchers refer to as the “dual process model.”

“When we’re grieving, there’s loss and restoration to deal with,” O’Connor says. “Restoration can be reaching out and helping our neighbors. We need a moment to have a drink and cry and talk with a person who gives us a hug. The key to mental health is being able to do both, to go back and forth between the building and the remembering. People who adapt most resiliently are the ones who are able to do both.”

Take the smallest possible step toward comfort

It’s also important to acknowledge what we’re capable of in this moment.

“There needs to be a caveat,” Tickner says. “Practicing mindfulness right now is really hard.”

Hunt says friends have recommended she take a moment to herself. It’s just not possible. “A friend was like, ‘I have a pass to a spa day. Maybe you can take it and relax.’ I said, ‘That sounds awesome, but I do not think I can do it.’ I would just start bawling on the table. I can’t imagine sitting in a hot tub. My brain is spinning. That kind of self-care would not work for me right now.”

Restoration can be reaching out and helping our neighbors. We need a moment to have a drink and cry and talk with a person who gives us a hug.

— Mary-Frances O’Connor, grief researcher and author

In such instances, says California Integrative Therapy’s Stark, simplify it. “Talking to friends, talking about how you feel, writing it down, making art, listening to music,” Stark says. Then, of course, get out and be a part of the community. Volunteering can be especially comforting.

And when friends offer help, accept it.

“We’re staying at a friend’s right now,” Stark says, “and their neighbors came over and they said, ‘We made too much pasta. Do you want some?’ And I started to say, ‘No, no, no, I can’t take.’ Then I heard myself say, ‘You have to accept. It’s just pasta.’ So I said yes, and they came over with the beautiful ziti and it was warm and lovely. And it made me feel so much better, even though I was in terror.

“So please,” Stark says, “say yes to anything people offer you.”

Say yes, write, put on music and volunteer if you can — easy tips, says Stark, but ones with long-term health benefits.

“Every time you do a practice like that, you’re literally opening up a new neuronal pattern in your brain that expands your selfhood, your ability and that wonderful word we use called ‘resilience.’”

Lifestyle

Doctors says ‘The Pitt’ reflects the gritty realities of medicine today

Published

11 hours ago

January 9, 2026

Press Room

Doctors says ‘The Pitt’ reflects the gritty realities of medicine today

From left: Noah Wyle plays Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, the senior attending physician, and Fiona Dourif plays Dr. Cassie McKay, a third-year resident, in a fictional Pittsburgh emergency department in the HBO Max series The Pitt.

Warrick Page/HBO Max

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Warrick Page/HBO Max

The first five minutes of the new season of The Pitt instantly capture the state of medicine in the mid-2020s: a hectic emergency department waiting room; a sign warning that aggressive behavior will not be tolerated; a memorial plaque for victims of a mass shooting; and a patient with large Ziploc bags filled to the brink with various supplements and homeopathic remedies.

Scenes from the new installment feel almost too recognizable to many doctors.

The return of the critically acclaimed medical drama streaming on HBO Max offers viewers a surprisingly realistic view of how doctors practice medicine in an age of political division, institutional mistrust and the corporatization of health care.

Each season covers one day in the kinetic, understaffed emergency department of a fictional Pittsburgh hospital, with each episode spanning a single hour of a 15-hour shift. That means there’s no time for romantic plots or far-fetched storylines that typically dominate medical dramas.

Instead, the fast-paced show takes viewers into the real world of the ER, complete with a firehose of medical jargon and the day-to-day struggles of those on the frontlines of the American health care system. It’s a microcosm of medicine — and of a fragmented United States.

Noah Wyle plays Dr. Michael "Robby" Rabinovitch in The Pitt.

Many doctors and health professionals praised season one of the series, and ER docs even invited the show’s star Noah Wyle to their annual conference in September.

So what do doctors think of the new season? As a medical student myself, I appreciated the dig at the “July effect” — the long-held belief that the quality of care decreases in July when newbie doctors start residency — rebranded “first week in July syndrome” by one of the characters.

That insider wink sets the tone for a season that Dr. Alok Patel, a pediatrician at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health, says is on point. Patel, who co-hosts the show’s companion podcast, watched the first nine episodes of the new installment and spoke to NPR about his first impressions.

To me, as a medical student, the first few scenes of the new season are pretty striking, and they resemble what modern-day emergency medicine looks and sounds like. From your point of view, how accurate is it?

I’ll say off the bat, when it comes to capturing the full essence of practicing health care — the highs, the lows and the frustrations — The Pitt is by far the most medically accurate show that I think has ever been created. And I’m not the only one to share that opinion. I hear that a lot from my colleagues.

OK, but is every shift really that chaotic?

I mean, obviously, it’s television. And I know a lot of ER doctors who watch the show and are like, “Hey, it’s really good, but not every shift is that crazy.” I’m like, “Come on, relax. It’s TV. You’ve got to take a little bit of liberties.”

As in its last season, The Pitt sheds light on the real — sometimes boring — bureaucratic burdens doctors deal with that often get in the way of good medicine. How does that resonate with real doctors?

There are so many topics that affect patient care that are not glorified. And so The Pitt did this really artful job of inserting these topics with the right characters and the right relatable scenarios. I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s a pretty relatable issue in season two with medical bills.

Right. Insurance seems to take center stage at times this season — almost as a character itself — which seems apt for this moment when many Americans are facing a sharp rise in costs. But these mundane — yet heartbreaking — moments don’t usually make their way into medical dramas, right?

I guarantee when people see this, they’re going to nod their head because they know someone who has been affected by a huge hospital bill.

If you’re going to tell a story about an emergency department that is being led by these compassionate health care workers doing everything they can for patients, you’ve got to make sure you insert all of health care into it.

As the characters juggle multiple patients each hour, a familiar motif returns: medical providers grappling with some heavy burdens outside of work.

Yeah, the reality is that if you’re working a busy shift and you have things happening in your personal life, the line between personal life and professional life gets blurred and people have moments.

The Pitt highlights that and it shows that doctors are real people. Nurses are actual human beings. And sometimes things happen, and it spills out into the workplace. It’s time we take a step back and not only recognize it, but also appreciate what people are dealing with.

2025 was another tough year for doctors. Many had to continue to battle misinformation while simultaneously practicing medicine. How does medical misinformation fit into season two?

I wouldn’t say it’s just mistrust of medicine. I mean that theme definitely shows up in The Pitt, but people are also just confused. They don’t know where to get their information from. They don’t know who to trust. They don’t know what the right decision is.

There’s one specific scene in season two that, again, no spoilers here, but involves somebody getting their information from social media. And that again is a very real theme.

In recent years, physical and verbal abuse of healthcare workers has risen, fueling mental health struggles among providers. The Pitt was praised for diving into this reality. Does it return this season?

The new season of The Pitt still has some of that tension between patients and health care professionals — and sometimes it’s completely projected or misdirected. People are frustrated, they get pissed off when they can’t see a doctor in time and they may act out.

The characters who get physically attacked in The Pitt just brush it off. That whole concept of having to suppress this aggression and then the frustration that there’s not enough protection for health care workers, that’s a very real issue.

A new attending physician, Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi, joins the cast this season. Sepideh Moafi plays her, and she works closely with the veteran attending physician, Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch, played by Noah Wyle. What are your — and Robby’s — first impressions of her?

Right off the bat in the first episode, people get to meet this brilliant firecracker. Dr. Al-Hashimi, versus Dr. Robby, almost represents two generations of attending physicians. They’re almost on two sides of this coin, and there’s a little bit of clashing.

Sepideh Moafi, fourth from left, as Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi, the new attending physician, huddles with her team around a patient in a fictional Pittsburgh teaching hospital in the HBO Max series The Pitt.

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Part of that clash is her clear-eyed take on artificial intelligence and its role in medicine. And she thinks AI can help doctors document what’s happening with patients — also called charting — right?

Yep, Dr. Al-Hashimi is an advocate for AI tools in the ER because, I swear to God, they make health care workers’ lives more efficient. They make things such as charting faster, which is a theme that shows up in season two.

But then Dr. Robby gives a very interesting rebuttal to the widespread use of AI. The worry is that if we put AI tools everywhere, then all of a sudden, the financial arm of health care would say, “Cool, now you can double how many patients you see. We will not give you any more resources, but with these AI tools, you can generate more money for the system.”

The new installment also continues to touch on the growing corporatization of medicine. In season one we saw how Dr. Robby and his staff were being pushed to see more patients.

Yes, it really helps the audience understand the kind of stressors that people are dealing with while they’re just trying to take care of patients.

In the first season, when Dr. Robby kind of had that back and forth with the hospital administrator, doctors were immediately won over because that is such a big point of frustration — such a massive barrier.

There are so many more themes explored this season. What else should viewers look forward to?

I’m really excited for viewers to dive into the character development. It’s so reflective of how it really goes in residency. So much happens between your first year and second year of residency — not only in terms of your medical skill, but also in terms of your development as a person.

I think what’s also really fascinating is that The Pitt has life lessons buried in every episode. Sometimes you catch it immediately, sometimes it’s at the end, sometimes you catch it when you watch it again.

But it represents so much of humanity because humanity doesn’t get put on hold when you get sick — you just go to the hospital with your full self. And so every episode — every patient scenario — there is a lesson to learn.

Michal Ruprecht is a Stanford Global Health Media Fellow and a fourth-year medical student.

Lifestyle

In Beauty, Private Equity Is Hot Again

Published

12 hours ago

January 9, 2026

Press Room

As strategic firms slow down their shopping sprees and venture capital dollars dry up, PE firms’ reputation for asset stripping is a thing of the past. Founders are now often hoping for private equity buyouts, but want to be sure there can be a true partnership.

Lifestyle

10 books we’re looking forward to in early 2026

Published

23 hours ago

January 8, 2026

Press Room

10 books we’re looking forward to in early 2026

Two fiction books about good friends coming from different circumstances. Two biographies of people whose influence on American culture is, arguably, still underrated. One Liza Minnelli memoir. These are just a handful of books coming out in the first few months of 2026 that we’ve got our eye on.

Fiction

Autobiography of Cotton, by Cristina Rivera Garza, Feb. 3

Garza, who won a Pulitzer in 2024 for memoir/autobiography, actually first published Autobiography of Cotton back in 2020, but it’s only now getting an English translation. The book blends fiction with the author’s own familial history to tell the story of cotton cultivation along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Crux, by Gabriel Tallent, Jan. 20

Tallent’s last novel, My Absolute Darling, was a harrowing coming of age story about a teenage girl surviving her abusive survivalist father. But it did find pockets of beauty in the outdoors. Tallent’s follow up looks to be similarly awestruck by nature. It’s about two young friends, separated by class and opportunity, but bound together by a love of rock climbing.

Half His Age, by Jennette McCurdy, Jan. 20

The former iCarly actress’ bracing and brutally honest memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, was a huge hit. It spent weeks on bestseller’s lists, and is being adapted into a series for Apple TV+. Now McCurdy’s set to come out with her fiction debut, about a teenage girl who falls for her high school creative writing teacher.

Kin, by Tayari Jones, Feb. 24

Similarly to Crux, Kin also follows two friends across the years as options and opportunities pull them apart. The friends at the center of this book are two women who grew up without moms. Jones’ last novel, 2018’s An American Marriage, was a huge hit with critics.

Seasons of Glass & Iron, by Amal El-Mohtar

Seasons of Glass & Iron: Stories, by Amal El-Mohtar, March 24

El-Mohtar is an acclaimed science-fiction writer, and this book is a collection of previously published short stories and poetry. Many of the works here have been honored by the big science-fiction/fantasy awards, including the titular story, which is a feminist re-telling of two fairy tales.

Nonfiction

A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, by Gisèle Pelicot, Feb. 17

Pelicot’s story of rape and sexual assault – and her decision to wave anonymity in the trial – turned her into a galvanizing figure for women across the world. Her writing her own story of everything that happened is also a call to action for others to do the same.

Cosmic Music: The Life, Art, and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane, by Andy Beta, March 3

For decades, the life and work of Alice Coltrane has lived in the shadow of her husband, John Coltrane. This deeply researched biography hopes to properly contextualize her as one of the most visionary and influential musicians of her time.

Football, by Chuck Klosterman, Jan. 20

One of our great essaysists and (over?) thinkers turns his sights onto one of the last bits of monoculture we’ve got. But in one of the pieces in this collection, Klosterman wonders, how long until football is no longer the summation of American culture? But until that time comes, there’s plenty to dig into from gambling to debates over the true goat.

Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! by Liza Minnelli, with Michael Feinstein, March 20

Minnelli told People that previous attempts at telling her story “didn’t get it right,” so she’s doing it herself. This new memoir promises to get into her childhood, her marriages, and her struggles with substance abuse.

Tom Paine’s War: The Words that Rallied a Nation and the Founder of Our Time, by Jack Kelly, Jan. 6

If you haven’t heard, it’s a big birthday year for America. And it’s a birthday that might not have happened if not for the words of Thomas Paine. This new book from historian Jack Kelly makes the argument that Paine’s words are just as important and relevant to us today.