From Bethesda Magazine: How to heal, according to a local psychiatrist

Dr. Suzan Song of Bethesda wrote a book about navigating the setbacks of life

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May 1, 2026 3:00 p.m. | Updated: April 29, 2026 2:11 p.m.

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“We’re not supposed to do life alone,” says Dr. Suzan Song, 47, a psychiatrist who lives in Bethesda and sees patients virtually. 

Listening to trauma survivors in her work around the world, Song says she came to value the role of community in recovery. Her recent book, Why We Suffer and How We Heal: Using Narrative, Ritual, and Purpose to Flourish Through Life’s Challenges (Harmony/Penguin Random House, February 2026), emphasizes the importance of sharing stories, establishing rituals and finding a sense of purpose to move forward after hardships.

“Healing really happens with a sense of belonging in relation with others,” says Song, who grew up in Ellicott City, Maryland. 

Throughout the book, Song writes about her suffering, including the death of her father when she was 15 and lessons learned from the experience. Song says she didn’t talk about the loss for years, pouring herself into her work in a quest for stability. She has a doctor of medicine degree from the University of Chicago, a doctorate in social-behavioral medicine from the University of Amsterdam and a master’s in health policy from the Harvard School of Public Health. 

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Song worked for universities and humanitarian agencies across sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, along with completing fieldwork in Burundi for her Ph.D., and is an adviser to U.S. federal agencies, including the departments of State and Justice. 

Song says she tries to bridge what she learned as a physician with what she witnessed from healers in other cultures working with people who seemed to thrive after crisis. 

In Sierra Leone, Song says she met a woman who had been a child soldier and sex slave for nearly a decade. She was a mother of two who seemed to be doing well in her village. Initially, Song thought the woman must have coped by talking through her ordeal with close family and friends. Instead, it was when her village elder got everyone together and did a body purification ritual that the woman felt accepted and it reinforced her identity. “That’s when I really saw the power of other ways of healing,” Song says. 

While working in Haiti in 2010, a month after the country’s devastating earthquake, Song encountered a boy who had lost his entire family in minutes. He befriended many of the other orphans and was giving them lessons in basic Haitian Creole and math. When Song asked if he needed anything at that moment, she expected him to say food or water. “He said, ‘I want you to help me become a teacher,’ ” Song says. “That really carried him. He felt the sense of purpose.” 

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In retelling these stories in her book, along with anecdotes of patients she treats in the U.S., Song offers practical advice for navigating the setbacks of life. She encourages people to give up the “illusion of stability” and dismiss the pressure in American society to think of resilience as an individual act of perseverance and grit. Song says suffering isn’t meant to be “privatized” and people need each other to weather life’s storms together.

While Song says the book is for anyone going through a hard time, she was motivated to write it for an audience of two: her children, ages 8 and 10. Beyond grades and achievement, she says, children need to learn how to handle adversity.  

Song adds: “What I most want for my kids is to know that life’s hard and they have the skills to get through it.” 

This appears in the May/June 2026 issue of Bethesda Magazine.

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Originally published at Bethesdamagazine