UHS CRISIS

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

As a psychiatrist who also practices in an academic community, I read Dr.Graham Blaine's comments on the "Crisis in Confidence" in the UHS psychiatric services with keen interest. Fortunately, Dr. Blaine is candid about the two-faced policy the health service follows with regard to confidentiality. If he feels free to decide unilaterally in an area as critical as the decision to take one's own life, that it is not his patient's right to have these most private thoughts kept in confidence, how is the patient to know what other sensitive area will be beyond the good doctor's limits? If I were a student in need of psychiatric service, I would take little comfort from Dean Glimp's outrageous assertion that tutors must know about students with suicidal impulses "so we can keep an eye on him." How do we know who else such an over solicitious administrator will need to have followed by his spies? Homosexuals? Radicals? Under-Achievers? Poets?

I have been of the opinion that physicians and government agencies should measure their success in the reduction in need for their services from the same clients. However, I didn't reckon with the bureaucratic mentality. Dr.Blaine and some administrators are "alarmed" at the decline of 6.4% in their trade. Is the really successful health service to aim at a 20% per year growth rate to keep up the GNP? Perhaps the health service psychiatrists and their administrative cohorts could use some of that increased leisure to think about the charges that the students are making against the adult society which they and the University represent. Howard M. Feinstein M.D.