Discussion

An immediate affirmative reply to Dr Martin's invitation to discuss his paper arose as a spontaneous response due to my long held pleasure in the train of thinking which he stimulated for me a decade and a half ago. Alec Martin's insitent espousal over the past several decades for our medical specialty to recognize the mental health values of leisure was, I believe construed for some time as a rather odd and distorted preoccupation. To be sure, many of us had what we often carefully hid from our serious colleagues — our secret vices — that is, the pleasures in which we indulged in the fragments of leisure captured rarely between the restrictions of our appointment books and the imposed limits of, hopefully, an annual vacation — even though sometimes, in these specialties, some of us take our patients with us on vacations.

I have always been attracted to the different as a source for creative stimulus. Dr. Martin's stress set in motion a continuing line of personal thought as to the place of leisure and relaxation as related to personality development and psychopathology. So, too, in moments of leisurely reflection, he achieved for me a perspective about my own pleasures — or vices — as said in guilt over leisure. This capacity for leisure some wonderful parents taught and encouraged in me so that now it is perceived without guilt more clearly as exciting and sometime joyful explorations of the world around me. My inner world now insists on planning time for leisure. Taking up Dr. Martin's flag, which I personally support for numerous reasons, I shall soon reveal, I insist that, in all psychiatric organizations in which my voice has been heard, it is hypocrisy to speak of mental health and then act otherwise by scheduling meetings in prime leisure time. One of my greatest joys was to lead the fight and win it against the scheduling of APA trustee meetings on weekends.

To be sure, before Dr. Martin and I met and commenced to know, respect and enjoy each other, I had rea