There was no single moment — Lauren had known "from quite early on in university" that she wanted to work outside the hospital. Medicine is necessarily protocol-driven and risk-minimizing, which "reduces the scope for creativity and innovation and trying something new" — and she "needed to flex the creative side of my brain."
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Lauren doesn't frame the decision as a rejection of medicine — she's clear the system is designed correctly for what it optimizes: "what you're optimizing for is that the patient gets the right outcome the first time and then subsequently every single time." But that necessity — minimizing risk, being "really protocol driven" — is exactly what squeezes out experimentation.
Her own preference ran the other way: "I really wanted to be in an environment that was like, I wanna try that and see if it works."
The cost of leaving was real: six years of university plus three years practising — "almost a decade of my life," and she "really remember[s] the sweat and the tears." The route out went through 18 months at a consulting firm and three years at health startups and scale-ups before Good Mind — landing her back in mental health, which she calls "fertile ground for opportunity."