When Stories Become Medicine: Dr. Danice Rinderknecht on Teen Mental Health, Healing, and Finding Your Inner Strength

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Telling My Story, the podcast where we explore real life stories, career journeys, personal growth, and the experiences that shape who we become. I'm Henry Chiwetelu, your host. Today's conversation is especially important because behind every young person who seem fine on the outside, there may be a story that nobody has heard. My guest today is Denise Renduchit, a board-certified family medicine physician, author, and advocate with more than 30 years of experience caring for patients and families. After decades in medicine, Dr. Denise took her passion for helping people beyond the doctor's office and into storytelling. Her debut young adult fantasy novel, The Spark: Light Begin to Between a Rock and a Hard Place, explore difficult realities such as teen anxiety, depression, and PTSD through an imaginative story of courage, self-dis- self-discovery, and belonging. Today, we are going to talk about the mental health challenges young people face, how parents can recognize when something may be wrong, why storytelling can open doors that ordinary conversation sometimes cannot, and what we can do to help young people understand they are not alone. Dr. Denise, welcome to Telling My Story, and it's a pleasure to have you here with us today.

Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

All right, Dr. Denise, you spent more than 30 years practicing family medicine. What made you decide to step into the world of young adult fiction?

Well, it, um, what, what I realized was that teens are, um, hard to reach, certainly sometimes for even parents, um, and, and even sometimes for doctors, I thi- And I think stories and music both touch a part of the heart and a part of the brain that, um, that lectures, uh, or just giving information simply can't reach. Um, and I started writing, and, um, and it just became clear, uh, that, that this really is a message of hope and that the, a message that there's always help out there, um, which I think a lot of teens feel isolated s- uh, especially with what's going on in their inner world. Um, so I'm hoping that this story can reach r- can reach teenagers and, and give them some basic skills and give them a language, um, to be able to discuss what they're feeling.

Yeah, that's actually true. Teen these days don't actually come out on the open and discuss how they're actually feeling because sometimes they feel that they might be laughed at, they might be talked about, they might be looked down upon. A lot of things just go on in their mind. So Dr. Denise, was there a particular moment you realized that story can communicate something much better that medicine alone couldn't?

Well, I think over a- all the years in practice, I, I think I was, um, not necessarily frustrated, but disappointed in how, um, how hard it was to make a difference in kids' lives sometimes. And I think, I think through story, um, it really gives kids a chance to see somebody going through some of what they're going through. Like in, in the book, somebody, um, has a panic attack and one of their friends helps them through it, and so you get that from both angles. And there's a section on bullying. Um, and I think, I think by seeing it