BMJ 1995;311:1568 (9 December)

Letters

Educational strategies to prevent depression

EDITOR,--The recent Personal View by a general practitioner with depression made sad reading.1 It seems to me that many of the factors that contributed to the author's depression are causing other general practitioners to become depressed and burnt out. Many young doctors are voting with their feet and not risking entering general practice. Obviously, no single answer to these problems exists, but two educational initiatives in which I am involved have proved valuable to a number of colleagues.

The first initiative is the Balint movement. Balint's work in the 1950s and 1960s helped even those general practitioners who were not directly involved in it to understand their patients better and to realise that general practitioners had many skills that specialists do not have. Balint's ideas enormously improved the morale of general practice at the time. I believe that they still can. The "classic" Balint group, meeting weekly for several years, . . . [Full text of this article]


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati    What's this?

Relevant Article

I should have been more selfish
BMJ 1995 311: 957. [Full Text]

Access all current jobs at BMJ Group
Whats new online at Student BMJ
Listen to the latest BMJ Interview