Sad Song

This post is about human perception, or rather, people with superiority complex.

Here, let the facts do the talking.

A research on medical students' attitude towards patients with mental illness shows that they react less positively towards them.

This is from ShockMD.com.

Concerns that the students appears to have with patients with mental illness ?

• Their perception that mental health patients will take up more time. This may be accurate as mental health care users do have higher consultation rates than the general population and take more time to evaluate these patients.
• They think that mental ill patients use more illegal drugs and they are concerned about child welfare of parents with mental illness. But substance abuse is generally found more frequently in young men with antisocial characteristics instead of schizophrenia. Children of parents with mental illness may be exposed to considerable psychosocial and genetic risks but this shouldn’t exclude the care for these patients, it should promote the health care.
• The students still have the perception that mental illness patients in the community have an
  increased risk of violence. This is not true. This is a common view fuelled by media coverage.
• In Schizophrenia the students presume compliance to be a bigger problem and they are less likely to undertake health promotion activities such as exercise and healthy diet.
• Students also thought that the patient with depression was deemed more likely to drink to excess than those with other diseases.

And,

Students need to appreciate that although patients with mental health problems may, as a group, be more difficult to manage than other patient groups, this does not mean that all – or even the majority – of such patients will be.

It comes to show just how we seem to think we are superior over others just because of factors such as social status, health status and education.
Sometimes, we really do need to be kicked back down to earth, before we realise how naive and close minded we were(are).


Robert P Dixon, Lesley M Roberts, Stephen Lawrie, Lisa A Jones, Martin S Humphreys (2008). Medical students’ attitudes to psychiatric illness in primary care Medical Education DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2923.2008.03183.x


On a related note, I saw this book on Amazon
This is part of the review.

But Maté never judges. His book is a powerful call-to-arms, both for the decriminalization of drugs and for a more sympathetic and informed view of addiction. As Maté observes, "Those whom we dismiss as 'junkies' are not creatures from a different world, only men and women mired at the extreme end of a continuum on which, here or there, all of us might well locate ourselves."

Apparently he also points out the flaw in the "fight against drugs" system. Looks interesting. Unfortunately it isn't available at my local library. It seems he and I share the same ideology. One day, I'll have to get the book.

So to all you narrow-minded fucks, do look beyond your self-centred ego and open up your mind.

"The open-minded see the truth in different things, the narrow-minded see only the differences.”