Why I Quit My Job as a Psychiatrist After 10 Years — With No Plan for What’s Next

About a year ago, Jyoti Jain left her job as a psychiatrist at a physician group in the Bay Area. Since then, she’s done, well, nothing.

It’s not that recruiters and colleagues haven’t reached out, or that Jyoti isn’t able to work. She’s gotten the usual onslaught of job-opportunity emails, and she can’t remember the last time she was in such good health.

The reason Jyoti isn’t working, or even seriously looking for a job, is that she doesn’t want to. When she decided to take a break from work, she did so without any plans or deadlines. For someone who fit the archetype of a physician — ambitious and regimented — the prospect of indefinitely hitting pause on her career felt foreign. And it was exactly what she needed.

We talked to Jyoti about why she chose to do nothing instead of changing jobs or taking structured leave, how the past year has affected her, and how she’s thinking about the next phase of work and life.

Here are seven takeaways that any physician considering a career break, especially a psychiatrist, will find valuable.

Needing a break doesn’t mean you picked the wrong profession.

Jyoti found her calling in psychiatry, which captured her interest early on in medical school. She saw the specialty as a creative slice of medicine where you need to look at every patient holistically, not just as a set of measurements.

She chose to pursue medicine knowing it was a high-pressure field, but she didn't understand just how unmanageable many physicians' jobs had become. "I come from a family where my mom was a pediatrician in New York. She was really busy, and I saw that. But there were some boundaries, some guardrails to it," she said. "Residency was the first time I learned what medicine really was — when my attending was yelling at somebody about an authorization for an inpatient psych stay for somebody who really needed it. And then I was like, oh, that's what medicine is now."

After Jyoti finished residency, she worked in a psych emergency room. Then she practiced outpatient adult psychiatry for about a decade, until leaving last March.

Jyoti didn’t just up and quit her job. She changed her role multiple times, trying out different clinical settings and even moving into a leadership position. But modifying her day-to-day responsibilities didn’t fix the underlying problem: Even though she felt at home in psychiatry, being a psychiatrist had taken everything out of her. A combination of increasing demands and dwindling resources amplified the difficulty of working in a system that was lean to begin with. Staying on her career path no longer felt sustainable.

After Jyoti gave notice, she spent a few months wrapping up her clinical casework and saying her goodbyes. Naturally, everyone asked what she was doing next, and some colleagues didn’t believe that she had nothing lined up. But that was the truth. After years of taking vacations that lasted two weeks or less, Jyoti was excited to have some real time off. She couldn’t be more specific than that, and she didn’t try. 

“Living like a resident” gives you choices — including the choice to do nothing for a little while.

Before Jyoti gave herself permission to quit her job, she assessed her finances. Could she realistically afford to stop working? Fortunately, Jyoti had never stopped living like a resident. By avoiding lifestyle creep, she was able to pay off her loans and put money away. Also, unlike many of her colleagues, Jyoti wasn’t financially supporting children or aging parents.

Jyoti was grateful that she’d saved enough to take a work break and still pursue hobbies and travel. She knew that many other people who felt just as depleted from working didn’t have the option to stop. She gave herself the credit she deserved (her responsible spending habits had paid off), while also acknowledging that she was in a position of privilege.

Not all work breaks are equal.

After Jyoti decided she needed a break from work, she faced the question of what that meant. Knowing her employer didn’t want to lose her, she considered asking for a sabbatical. But she realized that she wasn’t looking to get some R&R and return to her job in a more rejuvenated state. She wanted to sever ties with the system completely. “I didn’t want to have that looming over me,” she said. “With six months off, I think I'd just be thinking about going back, and that didn't seem happy to me.”

She also didn’t want to take a break for the sole purpose of figuring out her career. There are different types and degrees of work breaks. You can take a sabbatical and stay in the system. Or you can quit your job and immediately start looking for the next one. Or you can do what Jyoti did: quit your job and not look. Jyoti didn’t want to spend her days searching for a job, or even searching her soul for job-related clarity. She wanted to have free time that actually felt free.

Most people understand why a psychiatrist might need a break.

When friends of Jyoti’s who work in psychiatry mention open roles they’ve heard about, Jyoti doesn’t pretend that she’ll look into their suggestions. Instead, she openly says that she’s avoiding searching for jobs. Usually, no further explanation is needed. “They don’t even bat an eye,” Jyoti said. “They’re just like, ‘Oh yeah, I am really proud that you left your job. I wish I could, but I can't.’”

In fact, most psychiatrists urge her to take her time before coming back. They know how medicine is practiced today, and how taxing mental healthcare is in particular. "Our specialty is very unique," she noted.

The emergence of more resources tailored to physicians makes Jyoti feel less weary about starting her search, once she’s ready to take the plunge. For example, she plans to use Offcall, noting that it eliminates a lot of the work, and guesswork, surrounding salary and helps physicians advocate for what they're worth. Another resource that Jyoti might look into is SEAK, a company whose annual Non-Clinical Careers Conference helps physicians discover jobs outside clinical medicine and opportunities for supplemental income.

A break is a chance to reprogram your relationship with time.

When Jyoti first left her job, she didn’t know what to do with her unscheduled days. In medicine, no resource is more precious than time, so you learn to prioritize productivity above all else. Compensated work is the most obvious productive activity, but volunteering, networking, and even sleeping can all qualify, since they fulfill a clear purpose.

This past year, she’s undone a lot of that conditioning.

“That sense of how you spend your time and how you assign value to it. I had to get rid of that and redefine what ‘doing’ means,” she said. “Now, sometimes, doing is reading all day; sometimes doing is taking my dog for a walk and cooking dinner.”

One thing Jyoti thought she’d do more during her break was travel. The thing is, she’d always used some of her vacation days to travel. What she actually needed to learn was how to enjoy just being home. She has, and she sees it as a meaningful change.

As Jyoti has become less attached to her calendar, she’s gotten more pleasure out of whatever her days bring. For instance, she sometimes used to find it draining to spend time with friends and family. She’d look forward to wrapping up interactions so she could go home and rest. Now, she seeks out and enjoys those opportunities to connect.

She also used to have trouble being present, because her higher brain was always in the driver’s seat. “I think physicians are always on,” she said. “Even if we're literally off call, we’re still on in a way. We get a lot of inputs related to that, particularly in psychiatry. There’s always this sort of ‘hat’ you're wearing, on top of what you do that pays the bills. Being able to let go of that and be a person who's messy and doesn’t always need to do things.”

The value of a break doesn’t depend on what you do afterwards.

You might decide to leave medicine altogether, or shift into a different type of clinical role, or combine part-time clinical work with something else. Or you might even get a job that’s pretty similar to the one you left. A break doesn’t need to be a means to a specific career end.

Jyoti is starting to think about what her future holds. She’s not in job-search mode yet, but she’s putting out feelers and considering alternative ways to work in psychiatry. “Having done 10 years of outpatient care, and having had those relationships, they were beautiful and lovely, but I do think I need more boundaries,” she said.

One idea is to move into shift work — something along the lines of a hospitalist model for psychiatrists, where physicians staff inpatient units: “It’s hardcore for a week, and then you’re totally off. I’m leaning towards something where I’m not beholden to an entity.”

But she’s not rushing into anything. Not everyone gets the chance in life to do nothing, and Jyoti knows she’ll be busy with something soon enough.

The relationship between “being” and “doing” is complex.

During her break, Jyoti has gained perspective on who she is aside from “Dr. Jain.” Still, she suspects that psychiatry is permanently etched into her self-identity.

“There are parts of it that I do miss, like the patient interactions and being able to provide a place or space for somebody to speak openly without judgment. I think even just holding that space for somebody in and of itself is healing. I do think psychiatry is a fundamental part of me.”

At Offcall, we’re on a mission to improve the wealth and wellbeing of physicians. We’re proud to be backed by leading physician innovators from across the country, including Dr. Jyoti Jain. You can learn more about the other physicians behind Offcall on our About page and the Team Perspectives section of our blog. If you're new here, sign up for Offcall here.