{"id":64242,"date":"2016-03-26T22:40:51","date_gmt":"2016-03-27T02:40:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/?p=64242"},"modified":"2016-03-26T23:19:24","modified_gmt":"2016-03-27T03:19:24","slug":"a-nostalgia-break","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/2016\/03\/26\/a-nostalgia-break\/","title":{"rendered":"a nostalgia break<\/em>…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When March Madness<\/font> time comes around, I always remember a time when it wasn’t about Basketball for me – during the decade when I was a Psychiatric Residency Training Director.<\/font> That may sound like an honorific, but that’s not how it was. I was only a year beyond my own residency and wasn’t exactly recruited, I was conscripted amid a crisis when my predecessor abruptly quit. But "we need you to fill in<\/font>" lasted for a long time. And during those years, March Madness<\/font> referred to Match Week<\/font> – the week in which we found out what residents were or were not coming for next year. A few years ago, I had a nostalgia attack and made a graph of the history of Match Week<\/font> in psychiatry [fuzzy math…<\/a>]. As you can see, 1978 wasn’t a time when psychiatry was high on the list – filling only about half the positions offered. So Match Week<\/font> was a frantic period because there was much ado thereafter with the flow into psychiatry from outside the Match to negotiate.<\/p>\n

Also for 1978, it was a circus. It was at the end if Deinstitutionalization, the end of the Community Mental Health Movement, just after the Viet Nam War, and a peak time for the ideological and guild battles in mental health. We often think of the modern era in psychiatry beginning in 1980 with the DSM-III’s publication, and in a way that’s true. But at the same time, it was the end of a whole lot of other things – very loud things. Actually, the graph accurately reflects how it felt through that first post-DSM-III decade. Things just seemed to calm down.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The dip from around 1988 until 2004 spans the period when I started a practice until I retired, so I was otherwise occupied, ergo I know nothing about the why?<\/font><\/em> of the dip. Here are some selections and comparisons from the info about the 2016 match that came out yesterday [this was Match Week<\/font>], and I added 2016 to the graph above:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

The specialty choices of medical students is a broad topic, but it usually reflects something about the state of the specialty. The medical students are influenced a lot by their contact with attending physicians and residents they meet on their clinical rotations. And 2016 looks like business as usual [in fact, I’m a little surprised to see no effect from the turmoil one might’ve predicted from reading our various blogs].<\/p>\n

That first year after medical school sets a tone that endures throughout a career, something that persists even as medicine goes through its inevitable cart-wheels, its ups and downs. One of the pleasures of that Residency Training Director<\/font> decade of my life was watching people literally grow up in such a short period of time. Even tough they’re entering a different world than I did as a medical intern in 1967 or the second time around as a psych resident in 1974, the patients will bring the same turmoil and symptoms they’ve always brought. I guess I’m just taking a nostalgia break<\/font><\/em> from the focus on the contemporary problems that usually haunt these posts, and hoping the class of 2016 can look back in fifty years and feel like I do, that it was a good way to spend the days…<\/div>\n
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Note: The designation other<\/strong><\/font> on the graph is a mixed bag. The majority in that category are from non-US schools, but some are US citizens who went to medical school elsewhere.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When March Madness time comes around, I always remember a time when it wasn’t about Basketball for me – during the decade when I was a Psychiatric Residency Training Director. That may sound like an honorific, but that’s not how it was. I was only a year beyond my own residency and wasn’t exactly recruited, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64242"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64261,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64242\/revisions\/64261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}