Retraction

I'm in trouble this week, and deservedly so. A month ago, in this column, I was cheerfully poking fun at the current vogue among the medical profession to eschew academic credentials in curricula vitae in favour of the kind of competencies you might expect on a National Vocational Qualification (5 September, p 687). Thus, I argued, the canny job applicant in general practice removes the hard won undergraduate prizes and postgraduate diplomas for fear of outshining the interviewer and replaces them with a list of “can dos” such as episiotomies repaired, abscesses drained, and minor skin blemishes cauterised.

Except that I didn't use those examples. In a transparently fictitious description of my own CV, I claimed to have deleted the glittering prizes of my past and replaced them with “cysts I had aspirated, intrauterine contraceptive devices I had fitted, and menaces to society that I had successfully impounded under the Mental Health Act.”

My column usually attracts a small postbag that brings praise and condemnation in approximately equal proportions. Indeed, if I didn't pull some hard punches now and again I rather suspect the editor would have pensioned me off years ago, and most of you would have stopped reading what I write. Soundings has always been refreshingly post-feminist and beyond political correctness. Offending precious sensitivities and challenging those who love their animals to excess is precisely what we back page columnists are paid for. In 10 years of writing, therefore, I have never before felt compelled to go public on the angry responses of two correspondents out of a readership of well over 100 000.

The expression “menaces to society that I had successfully impounded” was, as a consultant psychiatrist pointed out with commendable understatement, an ill thought out phrase. Another doctor, who spoke from personal experience of mental illness, reminded me that the 1983 Mental Health Act is invoked to enable compulsory admission to hospital for treatment of people who require it for their own health, their own safety, or the protection of other people. The terms “menace” and “impound” are pejorative and profoundly hurtful to those who suffer, or have suffered, from serious mental illness.

In the past, I have argued strongly in this column and elsewhere for the destigmatisation of unglamorous illnesses such as epilepsy, stroke, and disfigurement. I have also, on occasion, boldly heaped criticism on the ill and the anxious to save them from the greater offence of being treated as untouchable. In last month's piece the humour of my conscious pen was directed against the absurdity of expressing professional merit in terms of numbers of completed “cases” of anything. But, as my correspondents both pointed out, the subliminal effect of that article (precisely because it was written in light hearted vein, not to be “taken seriously”) very effectively reinforces stereotypes that are deeply embedded into medical culture and the perceptions of the lay public.

Which is why I'm pointing it out for those of you who didn't notice. It was a daft thing to write, and I apologise.