The “Unethical” CV
by Noorin Damji, 2025 Medical Fellow
I started to put it together: my idea for a FASPE capstone. It would be my CV but inverted. Instead of all my accolades and positions, I would highlight the most ethically ambiguous parts of my work. Rather than discuss patient care, I would explore iatrogenic harms I’d committed. Rather than discuss patient advocacy efforts, I would explore the number of times I have hospitalized someone against their will.
Rather than discuss the extra therapy training I pursued, I would try to count the patients I have ordered tied in four-point restraints. These parts of my job are the hardest. Indeed, the best part of me wrestles with the ethics of these decisions every time I make them. Still, the visceral sense of infringement on another person cannot but be at the forefront of my mind.
As I started to compile my “unethical CV,” I had to work out some details; would I keep my name on it? Would I be okay with others reading it? How much should I focus on the parts of my professional journey that are less overtly about ethics but that reflect my ‘ordinary motives’—things that I did to advance my career?
I also started to think about alternative framings for each line of my current CV. I am, after all, an elite. I am in psychiatry, a field that harms children and relies on ‘big pharma’ to delude the ailing. I went to medical school in a 97% white state. Maybe I was admitted because of DEI! I worked to get “criminals” out of jail and into taxpayer- funded housing in liberal San Francisco. I earned my bachelor’s from a liberal bastion. I volunteered at a socialist medical program and involved our clinic in a Gay Pride parade. I tried to get expensive medications in the hands of people who were intravenous drug users. I distributed sterile syringes to “drug addicts” instead of helping them.
I have been trying to figure out how to draft this CV commentary/project. The FASPE capstone deadline is fast approaching. Charlie Kirk was just killed. Politically violent rhetoric proliferates, increasing the ambient tension. There are calls for civil war.
There are calls to dehumanize trans people. Elon Musk has called this a war between good and evil. Reported to their places of employment for expressing their views about a controversial figure, people are afraid. Simultaneously, individuals freely volunteer to compile lists of dissenters. It’s all too much.
I deleted my “unethical CV.” Why publish something that could destroy me? Where would such a document even find a home really? It would take just one screenshot online to destroy my career.
I feel afraid now more than I ever have. I know this is not the point of the FASPE experience or capstone, but it would feel disingenuous for me to write up a case report or discuss resource allocation, as I imagine some of my colleagues will. How can I do that right now?
In this environment, I feel deeply vulnerable bringing attention to the ethical questions that pervade my work. I am an immigrant. I am a dissenter and safety is the regime. I am the American Dream. I am gay. I am succeeding. I am a childless cat lady. I am now more afraid than I ever have been of living in line with my values and following my ethical principles. I wish I had something more or different to say. I am still trying to be the doctor I am supposed to be. Tonight, however, that feels impossible, feels unsafe—all as I consider living in America in 2025, rife with propaganda, living in the shadow of FASPE.
Noorin Damji was a 2025 FASPE Medical Fellow. She is a psychiatry resident at Duke University.