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Reducing the stress in medicine

Maudsley Hospital and Institute of Psychiatry, London

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Maudsley Hospital, Westways Clinic, 49 St James Road, Croydon, London CR9 2RR, UK
(sphardp@iop.kcl.ac.uk)

Keywords: stress; work pressure

There is certainly some good evidence that doctors suffer an increased prevalence of mental health problems compared with the general population,^1–3 the early postgraduate years being possibly the most stressful of all.^4–6

However, there have also been recent papers that throw doubt on the conventional belief that the medical profession has any particularly unusual psychological difficulty.⁷ Other studies of health workers reveal there are groups, such as nurses and managers, who show equally high stress levels.⁸ The fact that it's not just doctors but also others who work in the health services who suffer from high levels of psychological problems would naturally point the finger of suspicion for all this stress in medicine, to the workplace.

Work pressure can be considered as consisting partly of the strain embodied in the intrinsic practice of medicine wherever it is executed, but there are also specific working conditions to consider—the particular context . . . [Full text of this article]