Doctors need safe confessional and cathartic spaces

The newly elected (2017) President of the British Medical Association (BMA), Professor Pali Hungin, describes a crisis amongst doctors resulting from structural factors—particularly chronic under-resourcing. The crisis involves exacerbation of doctors’ mental health problems—not only in the acute sense such as suicidal ideation, but as a chronic condition of “disillusionment” and “loss of joy” (Hungin 2017), akin to loss of libido. Clare Gerada (2017), former chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners, describes “a profession in distress.” Medicine is a profession whose urge to create is deeply frustrated, the aesthetic overridden by the instrumental and functional, the functional a burden where the UK has 2.8 doctors per 1,000 people:

fewer doctors per head of population than most other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) . . . Out of the 33 countries for which the OECD has provided data, the UK ranks 22nd. The only European countries with fewer doctors per head of population are Poland and Slovenia.