WILKINSON, A. H. (London): ‘Psychosomatic concepts and approach in student health services’, chapter 7 in Students in need—essays in memory of Nicholas Malleson, SRHE,  Guildford (1978).

This essay is a chapter from the book Students in need written in memory of Nicholas Malleson. He was an early member of the Society for Psychosomatic Research (founded in 1955) and the editor of Matrix of medicine, a book that stresses the social aspects of illness and discusses the confusion between the concepts ‘psychosomatic’ and ‘somatopsychic’. Malleson, along with workers in other disciplines, made an important differentiation between a person's disease and dis-ease.

Agnes Wilkinson describes in an interesting way how she used these insights and an analytical approach in her work as physician in charge of the University of Bristol Student Health Service and subsequently as psychiatric adviser to students at the London School of Economics.

The author gives examples both of readily and of not easily treatable psychosomatic conditions and stresses the importance of staff group work as advocated by Balint, Malleson and others. She describes how analytic methods gradually entered Student Health Services, in particular those at the Universities of Belfast, Leicester and Sussex.

In the second part of her article Wilkinson gives an interesting account of two patients in whom the somatic response was of a long-standing nature and hence more resistant to change.

One patient responded to a moderately difficult situation in the present with the intense physical pain experienced in a near-death situation in infancy. For such patients the author advocates the co-operation of a doctor and a psychotherapist and she sees the student health service as an excellent setting for such team work. Among her references are several books and papers by members of the Society of Analytical Psychology.