02/13/2026
I’ve been watching The Pitt, the new Noah Wyle medical drama on HBO. The show clearly has excellent medical advisors making sure the procedures are accurate, the equipment is positioned correctly, and the jargon sounds right. But as a clinical social worker, I find myself laughing at scenes that aren’t meant to be funny, because the show reveals that its advisors understand social work and psychology exist, but not much more than that.
Let me give you the most efficient example. A 45-year-old patient explains that he was a high-functioning engineer until he “tried crystal m**h once and caught schizophrenia from the m**h.” That single line manages to insult both psychiatrists and people who use drugs simultaneously. That’s not how prodromal periods work. That’s not how amphetamine-induced psychosis works. That’s not how anything works. But someone wrote it, someone approved it, and millions of viewers absorbed it as medical fact.
Then there’s the 70-year-old woman who has never tried ma*****na before and eats nine w**d cookies. The doctors laugh about it and give her a warning because she’s just smiling and in a good mood. I need everyone to understand: if you ate nine w**d cookies with zero tolerance, you would not be smiling pleasantly. You would be in a dissociative crisis peeling the meat off your soul and wondering if time is real.
https://doctorsonsocialmedia.com/trust-the-system-that-broke-you/
