East versus West: the great divide

Abstract

The medical elective is one of the jewels of British medical education. For some, it is an opportunity to help the world's poorest people, whereas for others it offers 2 months of freedom. Regardless of our motives, all of us walk into a different culture with our own ideas about how the world should look. The elective is all about shattering those ideas to the ground. I travelled to India as an idealistic British medical student, under the assumption that inadequate resources were the only barriers to good mental healthcare in the East. This elective, an 8-week period in a psychiatric hospital in rural northern India, gave me an insight into the intricate links between culture, religion, spirituality and mental healthcare. Most importantly, it raised questions on the practice of medicine back in the UK, which can be summarised broadly under three headings: Autonomy; 'ideas, concerns and expectations'; and confidentiality. © The Author 2019. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.