Marital Stress and Medical Training: An Experience with a Support Group for Medical House Staff Wives

¹ Social Service Department, Children's Hospital at Stanford, Palo Alto, California

This paper reports on a support group for medical house staff wives. This informal group revealed prevailing feelings of depression, anger, frustration, and impotence in coping with their spouses' training period. All participants agreed that the group had been a positive experience, allowing them to express anger in a safe place, and not to their husbands. They also stated that the group validated the fact that their concerns were in fact real and shared by many women. Although it is unclear what the responsibility of a training program is to wives of physicians in training, this group demonstrated that not only were physicians stressed, but their wives were as well. Further study of the impact of the training experience on both physician and spouse would be helpful in determining appropriate methods of intervention to reduce feelings of stress and depression for both physician and spouse during the training period.