During his summers as an undergraduate student, Zaid Al Bahrani worked as a counselor at Camp Kesem in Ohio, a weeklong overnight camp for children impacted by a parent’s cancer diagnosis.
Some of the children had already lost a parent to cancer, and some were seeing their parents deal with the effects of the disease every day. The camp gave the children an opportunity to meet others who could understand what they were feeling – the anger and hope, sadness and frustration, confusion, grief, and sometimes peace.
“The way each child reacted to the traumas they experienced was very, very different,” Al Bahrani recalls. “That’s when I noticed how much I was drawn to this facet of the human experience. I began to see that as individuals we can hold beliefs that are seemingly paradoxical but both are true. That ambiguity and nuance made me want to understand people on a deeper level.”
That desire to delve into the contradictions and contrasts of human experience motivated Al Bahrani as a student in the University of Colorado School of Medicine and, after he graduates this month, will sustain him as he begins a four-year psychiatry residency also in the CU School of Medicine.
“People are just so incredibly complicated in a really beautiful way, and psychiatry tends to lean into the ambiguity of human experience,” he says. “In medicine there are objective metrics and objective signs of treatment, and the thing that excites me about psychiatry is balancing that with the moving target of what it means to be human.”
Finding a place in a new country
In many ways, Al Bahrani understood and keenly related with the paradoxes and plural identities the children at Camp Kesem experienced. He was born in Iraq between wars in a time of intense turmoil.
As war consumed the country, his parents sometimes slept on top of him and his older brother and sister, not knowing where or when bombs would drop. They made the difficult decision to immigrate to the United States and had little money when they initially arrived. His dad worked very hard, and his parents’ fundamental goal was to move to a country that is safe and provides a good education.
Zaid Al Bahrani, left, as a child with his mother and father, Saba and Mohamed Al Bahrani
From an early age, Al Bahrani lived with the uncertainty of dual identity, struggling to find his footing as a Middle Eastern emigree living in a small town in Ohio and as an American. He also experienced the bullying that many children of Middle Eastern descent endured after September 11, 2001.
“In the midst of that bullying I felt very lonely,” he recalls. “One of the central emotions of childhood was loneliness, which is why my identity conflict was even more exacerbated. It was loneliness not only in friendship, but the loneliness of not fitting …….
Source: https://news.cuanschutz.edu/medicine/zaid-al-bahrani