As someone who has watched every episode of Grey’s Anatomy, I have spent a lot of time inside the fictional halls of Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital.
After earning my Ph.D. in Medical Family Therapy, a question started following me through those episodes:
Where is the Medical Family Therapist?
Then The Pitt came along, with its intense portrayal of emergency medicine, and I found myself asking the same question again.
That question became the basis of a recent article my colleagues Danna Abraham, Katherine M. Hertlein, and I published in The Family Journal: “Where Is the Medical Family Therapist in Grey’s Anatomy and The Pitt? A Systemic and Cinema Therapy Perspective.” We analyzed both shows through systemic theory, narrative medicine, and cinema therapy to examine not only what medical dramas show us about healthcare, but also what, and whom they leave out.
What we found was a striking paradox: Relational suffering is everywhere, while relational expertise remains largely invisible.
Doctors Are Carrying More Than Medicine
Think about how often a physician on a medical drama delivers devastating news and then immediately becomes the family’s emotional support.
The physician explains the diagnosis, comforts a spouse, mediates family conflict, supports a grieving parent, reassures a traumatized colleague—and then moves on to the next medical emergency.
One of the clearest findings in our analysis was that emotional and relational labor is primarily delegated to physicians. In both shows, doctors repeatedly become emotional containers for patients, families, and colleagues, even while managing enormous clinical demands.
Compassion is certainly part of good medicine. But compassionate medical care is different from expecting physicians to independently carry the psychological and relational consequences of illness.
Illness Rarely Happens to One Person
A diagnosis may medically belong to one patient, but illness rarely happens to only one person.
Cancer can change a marriage.
Dementia can reorganize an entire family.
A traumatic injury can suddenly transform relationships between parents, children, siblings, and partners.
Death can alter a family’s story forever.
Our analysis found that families are consistently present during crises in both series. Yet they are often portrayed as extensions of the patient’s medical problem rather than as relational systems experiencing their own disruption.
This is where Medical Family Therapy offers a different lens.
Medical Family Therapists work from a biopsychosocial and systemic understanding of health and illness. They may address family communication, grief, caregiving stress, chronic illness adjustment, trauma, relational conflict, and the emotional impact of healthcare experiences.
Instead of asking only, “What is happening to this patient?”
We also ask, “What is happening to the relationships surrounding this patient?”
Burnout Is Bigger Than Self-Care
Both shows portray extraordinary levels of suffering among healthcare professionals.
Providers encounter death, traumatic injuries, medical errors, ethical dilemmas, institutional pressures, and grieving families.
Then they keep working.
Our study found that burnout, trauma exposure, emotional exhaustion, and moral injury are repeatedly normalized within these fictional healthcare cultures. The Pitt, in particular, portrays providers moving rapidly from devastating encounters into another emergency with little opportunity for emotional decompression.
Yet when healthcare professionals struggle, we often individualize the problem.
Are they resilient enough? Are they practicing self-care? Can they manage stress better?
A systemic perspective asks something different:
What is happening within the environment that keeps producing exhausted people?
Sometimes the individual does not simply need another coping strategy.
The system itself may need care.
Hospitals Have Emotional Lives
One of the most interesting findings from our analysis was that hospitals function as emotional systems.
Mentorship relationships can take on almost parental qualities. Conflict between two people can spread through an entire team. After traumatic events, grief and fear ripple throughout the institution. Under intense pressure, stress and emotional reactivity can become contagious.
A hospital, then, is more than a building where individual professionals treat individual bodies.
It is a relational ecosystem.
Understanding it that way changes how we think about provider well-being, teamwork, family involvement, and even healing itself.
What We Don’t See Matters
Of course, television cannot represent every healthcare profession.
But representation still matters.
Medical dramas help construct cultural stories about who heals, whose expertise matters, and what kinds of suffering deserve professional attention. Our analysis suggests that these stories continue to privilege biomedical and physician-centered understandings of care even when the problems unfolding on screen are clearly psychological, relational, and systemic.
The grieving families are already there.
The overwhelmed caregivers are there.
The traumatized physicians and nurses are there.
The struggling healthcare teams are there.
Perhaps our stories about medicine—and our actual healthcare systems—can make more room for the professionals trained to care for those relationships.
After all these years of watching Grey’s Anatomy, and now The Pitt, I am still asking:
Where is the Medical Family Therapist?
Maybe the larger question is why we have become so accustomed to healthcare stories in which relational suffering is everywhere, but the professionals trained to address it are nowhere to be seen.
