Who suffers the impact: some observations on health

LETTERS TO THE EDITORS

Who suffers the impact: some observations on health

Rita de Cássia Ramos Louzada^I; João Ferreira da Silva Filho^II

^IFederal University of Espirito Santo – UFES and Post-graduation Program in Psychiatry and Mental Health/Institute of Psychiatry – IPUB- Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

^IIProfessor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro - UFRJ

Mr. Editor,

The editorial entitled 'Who suffers the impact: considerations about conflicts of interest', published in September 2003, has focused on the impact factors, the politics of publication and the conflicts of interest. We would like to add some comments to that article, especially regarding the study by De Meis et al., initially presented in a lecture at the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of São Paulo -IEA/USP, and, several months afterwards, fully published in the Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research.¹ It is important to highlight that in this full version appear the impacts of the current academic rules on the researchers’ health. This reservation is not totally irrelevant as, differently from conflict of interests, the mental health of this type of worker is scarcely studied in our milieu. But, are researchers workers? Do they suffer with the new configurations of the academic work? At which point the psychical aspects interfere in this type of work? How can be measured the quality of work in Science? Are there differences in the working relations and conditions according to each area of knowledge?

De Meis et al.'s study seems to indicate that at least the second question should be affirmatively answered. Their findings, from interviews with tenured researchers and post-graduate students of the biochemical field, pointed to the existence of a burnout syndrome in that group. Twenty-one percent (21%) of the researched people had sought at least one psychiatric consultation or psychological therapy. In their conclusions these authors state that the growth of Brazilian science occurs at the cost of the huge emotional stress of the people involved.

At which point this would interest the clinician? Which type of attention our researchers - and especially post-graduate students as they still do not have the status of a researcher - receive regarding this situation? Are there data in Brazil about this issue? After all, if science is essential for the country’s growth, what has been done for its builders? Those are questions which aim to enlarge the reflection proposed by Clarice Gorenstein. Its time to start, in our milieu, a comprehensive debate on this issue, as well as it is beginning to occur in the international literature, in which it is possible to find data on anxiety and frustration among tenured researchers and young researchers (UK, US), due to the difficulties of working insertion or adaptation to the current demands of scientific work.^2-4 In this debate most of the material is found on opinion articles or scientific papers which use qualitative methods. Some authors highlight that this subject is hardly dealt with in surveys. Anyway, it is possible to identify two recent surveys: one in Norway,⁵ performed in 2001, in which there were found mental disorders among 17.2% of scientific post-graduate students (n=396), firstly graduated in medicine; and other Canadian study,⁶ which assessed the stress among medical students, residents and post-graduate students in sciences and whose results pointed to higher levels of stress among the latter: 50% of the students stated being stressed (n=829).

Although the approaches are differentiated, these studies claimed the existence of psychical suffering among researchers and students, what demands a higher investment on research, in order to better characterize each of these groups, their sufferings and their rank in the scientific field. In our opinion, this is a debate of interest of both clinicians and academics, as, beyond its scientific results, it may shed lights on the working process in science.

References

1. De Meis L, Velloso A, Lannes D, Carmo MS, De Meis C. The growing competition in Brazilian science: rites of passage, stress and burnout. Braz J Med Biol Res 2003 Sep;36(9):1135-41.

2. Allen-Collinson J, Hockey J. Capturing contracts: informal activity among contract researchers. British Journal of Sociology of Education 1998 19(4):497-513.

3. Stephan P, Mangematin V. Le stress des jeunes chercheurs américains. Biofutur 1997;171:37-9.

4. Louzada RCR, Silva Filho JF. Competitiveness is pushing scientists to the edge. SciDev. Science and Development Network. 2 Dec 2003. Available from: URL: http://www.scidev.net/EditorLetters/index.cfm?fuseaction=readeditorletter&itemid=19&language=1

5. Tyssen R, Vaglum P, Gronvold NT, Ekeberg O. Factors in medical school that predict postgraduate mental health problems in need of treatment. A nationwide and longitudinal study. Medical Education 2001;35:110-20.

6.Toews JA, Lockyer JM, Dobson DJ, Simpson E, Brownell AK, Brenneis F, MacPherson KM, Cohen GS. Analysis of stress levels among medical students, residents, and graduate students at four Canadian schools of medicine. Acad Med 1997 Nov;72(11):997-1002.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  28 Oct 2004
• Date of issue
  June 2004