Medical Student Syndrome

The path to doctordom is littered with the murky pits of self-diagnosis.

During the course of medical school, I have wondered whether I have had, at some point or another: diabetes (type 1 or 2), migraine, angina, gallstones, a pituitary adenoma, pneumonia, stomach ulcers, inflammatory bowel disease, renal stones, motor neurone disease, glandular fever, and some other more embarrassing things I’d rather not mention.

(In a few cases (not listed above) I have been right-however the majority of the time I have been, fortunately, wrong.)

Since becoming acquainted with psychiatry I have ‘diagnosed’ myself with: virtually every kind of mood disorder, a few of the anxiety disorders, a couple from child, and a couple from old age (yes, really!) psychiatry, and about 6 kinds of personality disorder.

(And before you shout ‘hypochondriac!’, most medical students I know are exactly the same. It’s an occupational hazard. In fact I just googled it and it even has a wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_clinical_syndrome)

What doesn't help is being around a bunch of people who have made it their career to worry about other people's mental health. The other day, I was having lunch with a group of people, talking about our ‘idiosyncracies’. I happened to mention, entirely light-heatedly, that I don’t like listening to albums out of sequence. (You wouldn’t read book chapters out of order, nor listen to a piece of classical music with the movements shuffled, so why do it with pop music, when the artist has chosen to put the songs in a particular order?)

The young resident on the table looked at me, put down his fork and said “Ah….so you’re an obsessive. What would happen if you did hear the songs out of order?”

I don’t know….I’d explode? No, nothing. It wouldn’t upset the rest of my day. I wouldn’t worry bad things would happen. It would just be mildly annoying.

This is a quirk. Everyone has them. Some people, dare I say it, might even find it endearing. One quirk does not a psychiatric diagnosis make.



On the road I live on, there are two lovely horse chestnut trees. On the ground there are scattered some lovely ripe conkers. Being from Britain, my natural instinct on seeing a conker, expecially a good one with nice sharp edges, and a flat top, is to pick it up (despite the fact it must be 15 years since I last played conkers). So I had a few in my pocket, reminding me of home, and generally not doing any harm.

I went to a seminar and slung my coat over the chairs. At the end of the seminar, the other students and I started to leave, when the guy doing the session noticed something on the polished wooden floor.

“What’s this?” He asked, examining it closely between forefinger and thumb.

“Oh,” I said, embarrassed “That’s mine. It’s a conker. It must have slipped from my pocket. I picked up a few on the way”

He looked at me directly, raised one eyebrow, and, with an amused smile on his lips, he said “So….you like to collect things?”