Javeed Sukhera MD PhD
@javeedsukhera.bsky.social
Physician. Educator. #MedEd Scientist. Views personal. 🇨🇦 in 🇺🇸.
I wrote something that begins with a horror movie I watched compulsively as a kid and eventually lands somewhere much more intimate: How do we keep living fully when the future feels frightening? drsukhera.substack.com/p/the-end-of...
The End of the World
Living Life at the Edge of Apocalypse
drsukhera.substack.com
My latest post starts in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, traveling with my son. It becomes a reflection on ambition, abundance, inheritance, responsibility, and the ways we carry what life asks of us. drsukhera.substack.com/p/holding-th...
Holding the Sky
Opening our hearts to a cruel and callous world
drsukhera.substack.com
My hometown is Toronto. On the shores of Lake Ontario. Beautiful and sparkling water. Today and tomorrow and for all time.
Bullies often confuse power with strength. They push until someone pushes back, mistake restraint for weakness, and rarely understand the damage they do to relationships they once took for granted.
We often stratify into a hierarchy of suffering because biomedical thinking valorizes objectivity. Yet to the sufferer, the pain is deeply real and therefore legitimate. There is much more to medicine and to healing than what is visible.
What does it mean to remain human inside institutions built around rules, risk, and safety? drsukhera.substack.com/p/secrets-an...
Secrets and Histories
The thin veil that separates patients and staff
drsukhera.substack.com
Like so many healthcare workers, the pandemic forced me to hold suffering that words could never fully capture. I believed that if we made it through, we might emerge more compassionate and more connected to one another.
The prayers have been offered. The bamboo poles dance; beautiful because they were never meant to last. Perhaps that is what travel has been teaching me. Children grow. Parents leave us. Journeys end. And yet somehow the heart grows and grows and grows. open.substack.com/pub/drsukher...
After Kuningan
On impermanence, the journeys that shape us, and learning to let go.
open.substack.com
I still think about a family walking together on a warm June evening. About the futures that were imagined but never lived. About what hatred stole. Their memory asks something of us. www.cbc.ca/radio/thecur...
Terrorism ruling in Afzaal family murders can help Muslim communities heal, says family friend | CBC Radio
When a judge ruled that the killer of the Afzaal family had committed terrorism, Dr. Javeed Sukhera felt a mix of emotions.
cbc.ca
“He drove me to the airport and did not cry, or if he did, he did after I was already on a silver plane in the sky above New York, where I could not see him.” At two years since my father’s passing, I wrote about grief and fatherhood and everything in between. open.substack.com/pub/drsukher...
Borrowed Light
Two years of being and becoming
open.substack.com
One of the most toxic things about social media is how comfortable people become openly disparaging human beings they have never met. Just turning strangers into caricatures for applause.
It takes courage to speak honestly, stay open, and keep your humanity intact in a time that rewards the opposite.
Motherhood reminds us that the deepest forms of love are rarely transactional. To nurture is to stay, to soften, to hold, to believe in someone’s becoming without needing credit in return. Today I celebrate that care remains one of the most radical human acts.
Confronting medicine’s need for humility is hard because every step toward honesty meets a wall of defensiveness …but walls eventually crumble when we keep showing up with truth.
When learners experience cognitive dissonance, perhaps something that contradicts their personal truth- what nudges them towards opening up vs shutting down? Educator vulnerability. Trust. Safety. Curiosity. Care. Excellent #SurgEd work from @javeedsukhera.bsky.social and team. 👏
Normalising vulnerability, humanising learning: A qualitative exploration of dissonance and growth in clinical learning environments
Introduction Dissonance is common in clinical learning, especially when experiencing conflict with prior beliefs, expectations, or developing identities. Yet, an understanding of how teachers and le...
asmepublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Honored to share my letter in Psychiatric Services: “Radical Recovery as a Blueprint for Rebuilding Trust.” Trust cannot be demanded. It has to be earned. Psychiatry must look in the mirror and: Share power. Invite critique. Make accountability visible. doi.org/10.1176/appi...
Radical Recovery as a Blueprint for Rebuilding Trust | Psychiatric Services
PsychiatryOnline.org is the platform for all American Psychiatric Association Publishing journals, DSM, and bestselling textbooks, as well as APA Practice Guidelines, and continuing medical education.
doi.org
🗣️ New paper from the CAMH Everyday Ethics Lab! 🧠 Do disease-based explanations of chronic pain reduce stigma? This is the question we set out to answer in our new paper in the @thejournalofpain.bsky.social #bioethics #neuroethics #stigma 1/9
No child is born more human because of the flag above their crib, no grief becomes less sacred because it speaks with an accent, no hunger is more tolerable because it crossed a line someone drew on a map.
Ambition without generosity becomes hunger. It keeps asking for more and never teaches you how to be full.
That image of Dana holding Perlah, with fireworks above and tears falling, hit me so deeply. It felt like the aspirations of America meeting its heartbreak, and still refusing to let go of hope. #thepitt
Cheer for strangers. Applaud people you will never meet again. Amplify someone else’s light without needing any of it for yourself. The world gets darker when everything is a competition.
You do not have to be free of self-doubt to walk back into the room. Some of the most important work of a life happens in the space between doubt and doing. open.substack.com/pub/drsukher...
Between Doubt and Doing
Each morning, I would gather my equipment.
open.substack.com
Sometimes I am still learning the difference between moving forward and running away. Still learning that the self you are fleeing has a longer stride than you think.
Controversy can make cruelty feel ordinary. That is when dignity matters most. In dark times, be intentional about bringing light. Be deliberate about uplifting voices that matter.
The world is loud with outrage, performance, and absurdity. Do not let it steal your attention from the people who love you, need you, and make your life real.
We do not stumble into love for our neighbors. We choose it. Against evidence. Against grievance. Against every algorithm designed to confirm that the people unlike us are the problem. #lovethyneighbor
I have sat at Seders with colleagues, with patients, and with friends. I have learned about freedom as a practice and what it means to be reminded of how it feels to be a stranger and still move through the world. Wishing chag Pesach sameach to those celebrating.
How do you test whether clinical AI is safe under pressure? Our team used red teaming to stress-test a patient-facing platform and showed that iterative improvements cut high-risk failures. A strong argument for continuous safety testing over one-time validation. doi.org/10.21203/rs....
Structured Red Teaming Improves Safety of a Clinical AI Multi-Agent Platform Under High-Risk Conditions
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents are increasingly used in clinical settings, yet their safety and reliability remain uncertain. We conducted a two-phase stress test using adversarial prompts and ev...
doi.org
Some kinds of grief never leave us. Sometimes it returns in echoes, in layers, through another loss or another memory. Love leaves marks that time cannot erase.
