Long Walk Out of the Woods: A Physician’s Story of Addiction, Depression, Hope, and Recovery

A pediatric oncologist and palliative care physician, Dr. Adam B. Hill, suffers stress and disillusionment with the culture of medicine, leading to alcoholism, depression, and suicidal thoughts. Then while in recovery, he loses a mentor to suicide, revealing the extent of the burnout epidemic in the medical field. By sharing his harrowing story, Dr. Hill shows how this problem manifests, considers ways to address it, and confronts commonplace attitudes regarding self-care, recovery/treatment, empathy, and vulnerability amongst medical practitioners. His book is a road map for better practices at a time when doctors around the world are struggling in silence.

Long Walk Out of the Woods is a game-changing personal narrative and prescriptive book. It expands on Dr. Hill’s famous 2017 essay in the New England Journal of Medicine, Breaking the Stigma: A Physician’s Perspective on Recovery and Self-Care .