Students’ Mental Health

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31237, 8 December 1966, Page 20

Students’ Mental Health

Sir,—The Texas University student was not a medical student and so not actually relevant to Professor Ironside’s statement, which Mr Wilson queried. A psychologist’s encroachment on psychiatry can be awkward. A medical student, intending to become a specialist in the nervous diseases and perhaps

seeking counsel from the university psychiatrist, could, if the latter expressed tenets similar to Mr Wilson’s “A fig for the diagnostic powers of vested specialists,” come away pondering whether his counsellor, himself a specialist, were on the fringe of schizophrenia. Unless medical science becomes as stagnant as psychology, the tensions of studying its ever-increas’ng progress sort out by natural selection the best possible brains for its new specialities. Hard luck on patients whose doctors as students may have been psychologically disturbed by the university psychiatrist.—Yours, etc., A. B. CEDARIAN. December 7, 1966.

Sir, —Dr. W. Ironside appears to pity the mentallyill medical students who, he admits, “all graduated in due course.” Should he not better direct his pity towards the suffering public upon whom the university and the Health Department have the colossal effrontery to foist these psy-chiatrically-ill as doctors? Is any check kept on them later? The respect, even awe, sometimes to ridiculous extents, extended to doctors allows their deficiencies to remain more easily hidden. Dr. Ironside at least offers an explanation for a very distressing personal experience. Although we now have to go 20 miles to a doctor, it is the shortest 20 miles in New Zealand. —Yours, etc., ANGUISHED. December 5, 1966.