WOMAN’S SUICIDE AFTER HER WORRY OVER TV PROGRAMME

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28531, 10 March 1958, Page 9

WOMAN’S SUICIDE AFTER HER WORRY OVER TV PROGRAMME

(Rec. 7 p.m.) STOCKTON-ON-TEES, March 7,

A woman who saw a television programme about cancer began to think she had the disease and brooded on it till she committed suicide.

At the inquest today a verdict of suicide while the mind was disturbed was given in the death of Mrs Edna Burbage, aged The Coroner commented: “It is like the people reading medical text books—-they think they have all the diseases they read about.”

Mrs Burbage’s husband said she had been suffering from abdominal pains during the week before her death. The cancer programme was in a British Broadcasting Corporation series on hospitals entitled “Your Life in Their Hands.”

The British Medical Association has attacked the programmes on the grounds that they encourage morbidity and stress disease rather than health. In London tonight, a British Medical Association spokesman, commenting on the suicide case, said: “It is just the sort of thing we were afraid would happen.” The 8.8. C. declined to comment.

Yesterday four doctors wrote to the British Medical Journal describing how they had been called to attend men who had fainted in horror at a heart operation film in the same television series.

One man was taken to hospital with a split skull after knocking himself out when he fainted. Another cut his head when he fell off his chair, and a third brought his doctor out across miles of snow-covered roads.