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possible of all the natural ingredients in the wheat. We should refuse to eat the
pure white flour. We might try cooking things more in olive oil than in lard or
animal fat or dripping. We might experiment too with maize and soya flour
diets.
1 Bronte-Stewart, B., et al. (1955a) Lancet, ii. 1103.
2 Bronte-Stewart, B., et al. (1956) Lancet, i. 521.
3 Sinclair, H. M., (1956) Lancet, i. 381.
FATIGUE IN WOMEN
In the infant welfare clinics we have been noticing that a number of
younger mothers seem to complain more of fatigue than their mothers used to do.
These younger women are those with one or two young children; they usually
come from good homes where the standards are high. I wonder if the struggle
for the maintenance of high standards of health and well-being; the possession
of a good home and furniture, the keeping up of appearances with the neighbours;
the maintenance of a high standard of infant and child welfare; the
pressure on all sides from the welfare services, women's magazines, and other
sources of information and teaching, whether all these tend to exhaust our
mothers too much. Forty years ago I fancy our mothers weren't so well
informed; so I wonder if the fatigue is due to the pressure of modern life,
or do our present day standards demand too much? We must not let our quest
for excellence be so strong and enthusiastic as to be inimical to the welfare of
those for whom it is intended.
YOUR SYMPTOMS
What We Feel.
A woman patient recently said to me "I have no need of a psychiatrist,
I am physically ill, not mentally ill." For a considerable time she had been
explaining in great detail her symptoms. She spoke at great length about a
minor physical disability which prevented her from carrying out her work
properly. She spent a great deal of time explaining the attitude of a woman she
knew and how this woman was a difficult person to get along with, indeed a
social failure. She enlarged on the philosophy of friendship in general, explaining
how necessary it was to adopt certain attitudes in life in order to keep friends
with people. She switched her conversation rapidly from one subject to another
until it became difficult to follow her arguments at all clearly or closely. She
was in reality exhibiting the reaction of the psychotic who escapes reality by
imagining himself the victim of circumstances and plots and then indulges in
garrulous explanations about the causes.
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