Alannah Tompkins
Mental health problems among medical practitioners are a touchy subject. There has been research on anxiety, depression, and burnout in different occupations, and medicine has come in for its share of attention, but it is a difficult topic to address in the present given twenty-first century aspirations to seemingly infallible practice. It is reassuring, I hope, to learn that we can also study the phenomenon in the past and realise that infallibility or perfection is a myth in medical practice; current practitioners might take comfort from predecessors who were human first, and qualified doctors second.
“If you were to be crass, you could say there is a bit of a flavour of the month about it,” former Health Minister David Caygill says about mental health, during a conversation in a Christchurch cafe. It does sound crass, but it’s true. The shortfalls of our mental health system are a constant topic of discussion at the dinner table, in Parliament and in the media. Headlines claiming the system is “broken” or “on a knife edge” are frequent, and hard to ignore. You don’t have to look far to find a story about a mental health advocate calling for an independent review, or a grieving family member whose child killed themselves while in the care of services.
There is wide debate about the cultural role of melancholia. American academic Eric Wilson writes of the dangers of bland candy-coloured happiness brought about, he says by swallowing pills. In