medical student's stigmatizing attitude towards psychiatric label

To evaluate the effect of a psychiatric label attached to a normal person, on the attitude of final year medical students in Pakistan. Cross-sectional survey. This survey was conducted among final year medical students in Chandka Medical College Larkana, Pakistan in July 2009. Self administered questionnaire was used consisting of a demographic details, a single-paragraph vignette depicting a normal person and a modified social distance scale was used to elicit responses from final year medical students. The randomly selected students were divided in to two groups; group A received a case description with a psychiatric label attached while group B received the same case description without a label. Response rate was of more than 99%. Out of them 61.4% were males. More than half responded to the questionnaire with the attached psychiatric label and 48.8% responded to the questionnaire without label. Mean [SD] age of the participants was 23.76 [4.43]. Significant number of Students were, unwilling to do shopping from the market run by the person with label [p = 0.025], and to have him in his work place [p = 0.024] or share room with him [p = 0.023] as compared to the willing students. Also significant number of students thought that friendship with the psychiatric patient will adversely affect their mental health [p=0.03]. These results confirm that label does affect view of medical students towards individual the irrespective of his/her behavior

Gender Identity Disorder. Is this a potentially fatal condition?

A person with a Gender Identity Disorder [GID] is a person who strongly identifies with the other sex. The individual may identify with the opposite sex to the point of believing that he/she is, in fact, a member of the other sex who is trapped in the wrong body. The treatment option is sex reassignment surgery. In Pakistan There is no specialized facility sex reassignment surgery. This case report deals with possible serious outcome of GID in Pakistan as a result of castration procedure which is carried out by 'gurus' in Pakistan. A systemic research in our country to this effect is required to find out the outcome of GID in Pakistan