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Resilience, Recovery, and Redefining Success
Mental health care is changing, and so too is the shape of leadership within it. At HETI Higher Education’s 2024 graduation ceremony, Master of Psychiatric Medicine graduate Dr Kieran Allen, psychiatry registrar and member of the HETI Higher Education Governing Council, was recognised with an Academic Excellence Award.
His story illustrates a hopeful shift in psychiatry - success measured not by grades and titles, but by reflective practice, honesty, and care for self and others.
Kieran describes the award as the culmination of years of effort, personal and professional sacrifice, and success. He credits academic achievement to “sitting within an environment that values the sharing of knowledge, being supported to openly express a considered opinion and the building of a capacity to evaluate and conduct novel research.”
Yet, his reflection goes further, placing significant weight on the value of continuous evolution of self awareness and the importance of values-guided ethical judgment.
I’m a doctor, a psychiatry trainee, a father and a husband, but I also live with a chronic mental illness.” Dr Kieran Allen, Master of Psychiatric Medicine graduate.
For years, he kept many parts of his identity private. He worried that genuine openness might be seen as unprofessional or that he was somehow less capable. Choosing to speak openly was an evolution, rather than a single moment for Kieran. His considered decision aligns with contemporary mental health advocacy and the need to consistently promote cultures where clinicians can accept the complexity of the human existence and are enabled to seek help without fear.
Kieran lives with bipolar disorder. His life includes long periods of wellness interspersed with times of acute suffering.
There have been professional highlights he is proud of, and significant challenging periods throughout his training.
At first, Kieran shared his experiences of “depression”, feeling safer in utilising a label that tending to evoke a more positive response in others. Sharing his story in a more comprehensive sense required an acceptance of the “bipolar” label, risking the emergence of significant stigma in his colleagues.
Whilst not feeling safe to share his story more fully, Kieran’s choice to reject a safer “sanitised version” allowed a greater sense of authenticity and self-acceptance.
He cautions against sharing stories of lived experience as neat case studies or conference-friendly narratives.
The stories we tell usually celebrate the hero’s journey. The colleague who is burnt out and stressed, taking the brave step to seek treatment that is the key to a total recovery and return to their past self.” Dr Kieran Allen.
“But what about those who don’t match up to this? What about the stories that are messy, recurrent, those that don’t resolve? Do we not value these stories as well?” he noted. Openly sharing a story that fails to adhere to a linear narrative of recovery provides Kieran an opportunity to widen the lens that patients and clinicians alike often continue to manage their own battles. Their stories matter, even without a tidy ending.
For Kieran, being both a doctor and a patient is not a contradiction. Nor should it be viewed as a dichotomy.
“Wearing many hats doesn’t make me less of a clinician,” he reflected. “Indeed, it has probably allowed me to better understand the unique challenges experienced in multiple roles.”
He rejects the false divide between “those with lived experience” and “health professionals,” highlighting the danger that entrenched encampment can lead to. He views clinicians as people first. People who help, who hurt, who understand, and who need to be understood.
This view endorses preventative approaches in mental health, noticing early signs, building reflective habits, and designing work and study environments that support wellbeing over the long term – but also rejects the blame directed toward clinicians when these are insufficient.
Kieran values education strategies that support mental health, including the critical role of supervision and peer review, exploring our continually evolving professional identities and encouraging authentic dialogue of the value of our individual experiences alongside traditional academic outcomes.
Kieran’s contribution extends beyond the classroom and clinic to governance.
On the HETI Higher Education Governing Council, he brings academic rigour and lived experience to conversations about curriculum, student support, and safe learning cultures. His visibility signals that excellence in psychiatry can include transparency, humility, and a willingness to engage with complexity. Not as an add on, but as part of core professional practice.
Kieran’s message is unequivocal: let go of the idea that strength means never struggling; resist the assumption that only stories with perfect endings deserve attention.
Let your work be led not only by empirical evidence, but by empathy, by humility, and by the kind of wisdom story conveys that rarely arises from textbooks.” Dr Kieran Allen.
As the next generation of psychiatric leaders steps forward, the question for education and health systems is clear.
How can institutions like HETI Higher Education continue to build learning environments that enable reflective, resilient clinicians, people who bring integrity, insight, reflection and excellence to psychiatric practice over the course of their careers?
