xxAACP Newsletter, Volume 11, Number 4, Autumn 1997
Letters and Brief Notes
Some of your readers may have read my letter to the Psychiatric News last year proclaiming the triumph of the Puclic Psychiatry Training Program over the shortage of psychiatrists in rural Oregon. Well, pardon me while I swallow that crow. It looks like I spoke too soon. A number of factors seem to be operating that have increased the demand beyond our ability to supply enough psychiatrists just from our graduating residents. To begin with, the Oregon Health plan is creating business, allowing poor people who previously weren't eligible for Medicaid to qualify for mental health benefits under the expanded criteria of the plan. In addition, several very hard working state hospital and CMHC psychiatrists are retiring this year. We only graduate about 6 adult psychiatrists/year which this year won't be enough. To add to that, it is difficult to get a medical license in Oregon if you are ten years past national or specialty boards because you have to take a written test. No one wants to do that and risk flunking, effectively ruling out experienced and even certified people over 45 who want to relocate here. I get weekly calls from the state hospital and county mental health programs looking for psychiatrists. Salaries have always been low here but this shortage may even drive them up. Any one interested in doing public work in Oregon can call me direct for details.
David Cutler, MD
503-494-8147
A Tribute to Princess Diana
Like billions of others on our seemingly shrinking and increasingly intimate planet, I struggled to organize and make sense of the series of most unfortunate circumstances taht coalesced into this tragedy, and to make meaning of the apparently meaningless. I know that I, like many, many others, had no idea of the impact that this person had on me.
Clearly, Princess Diana plucked a chord in many of us, chords that sounded together in an exquisite requiem of affection and grief felt around the world. We grieved the loss of an extraordinary, ordinary individual who succeeded in transcending the constraints of royal life, the torments of mental illness, and the misery of a failed marriage to embrace others who suffer. She was sincere, she was vulnerable, and she cared deeply.
One of the great tragedies of this tragedy of tragedies is that Princess Diana can never know in life how much she had given to us, how appreciative we are, and how much we would like to give back to her. While this is not possible, we can, in her memory, continue her work of reaching out to and caring for those who suffer and are without hope. Even in death, she can shine for us like a beacon of example, shoing us the way to make our world into one great community of caring communities.
Gordon Clark, Jr. MD, MDiv
FAPA, Founding President
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