Talkin’ ‘bout a revolution

To the Editor

Doctor welfare is so hot right now. The issue has been prominent. We have seen much ink spent on the topic both among the general public and on pages of our college journals (Forbes et al., 2018; Kim et al., 2018). Once again, we talk about the individual factors, we talk about the training burden and we talk about the system issues (Kim et al., 2018). We talk about how we should be more mindful, how we should be more organised, and give away confidential numbers doctors can call. But most of us are struggling through in the public mental health system. We continue to ‘beat on, our boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’ (Looi and Kisely, 2018).

In his book ‘Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t’, Simon Sinek talks about the danger of abstraction. Abstraction happens when we cease to see people as human, and start thinking of them as numbers or labels. Most of us work within a system that amplifies abstraction: we are no longer doctors caring for patients. Instead, we are service providers providing service for consumers. We are a sum of key performance indicators and activity-based funding. In the book, Sinek defines a consumer as ‘an abstraction of a person who we hope will consume whatever we have to offer’. He was not talking about psychiatry, but it makes you wonder about the impact of labelling our patients consumers.

Whenever I see another twitter feed about doctor welfare on my phone, I think about lines from the Tracey Chapman song: ‘Don’t you know/They’re talkin’ ‘bout a revolution/It sounds like a whisper/And finally the tables are starting to turn’. I hope that the tables are turning. I hope that the whisper is getting louder. Because we are talking about trying to change the way we practice, the way we are managed and the way we save lives. We are talking about a revolution.