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Ronald M. Davis, MD
Resident Member AMA Board of Trustees

Marian Craighill, MD
Chairperson Ad Hoc Committee on the Environment of the Resident AMA Resident Physicians Section

JAMA. 1985;253(19):2829.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

Wentz and Ford¹ provided an interesting historical review of the internship year of graduate medical education. We wish to respond to some of their observations, and to offer a few of our own.

The authors appropriately draw attention to the effects of internship on the young physician's mental health. Severe emotional distress, depression, sleep deprivation, impaired cognition, irritability, and impaired interpersonal relationships ("most notably with wife and family") are mentioned. We must point out that the internship affects husbands as well as wives—women made up 24% of all residents in 1983 and were found in all specialties with accredited programs.²

Although the authors caution that these potential effects "must not be lightly dismissed," they cite one study³ that "suggests that interns do tend to retrospectively exaggerate the degree of emotional distress they experience." We question the conclusions of that study, which are based on . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Footnotes
Edited by Drummond Rennie, MD, Senior Contributing Editor.

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