![\"Richard](\"http:\/\/www.bmj.com\/site\/blog\/icons\/bmjh7648e.jpg\")
It\u2019s hard not to be fascinated by Francois Hollande\u2019s alleged (why do we keep bothering with this word?) affair with an actress with stories of two Parisian love nests, bags of croissants being delivered by security men for breakfast, and the president travelling by scooter for their assignations. But the bit of the story that fascinates me most is the role of doctors. Are they, I wonder, being used?<\/p>\n
Anonymous doctors first entered the story when Hollande\u2019s \u201cofficial partner\u201d\u2014Valerie Trierweiler, \u201cthe First Girlfriend,\u201d\u2014was admitted to hospital with a coup de blues<\/em>. It seems she admitted herself for tests, but did any doctor have to agree? We are led to think that this was her reaction to being told about her partner\u2019s affair, but it\u2019s hard to believe that she didn\u2019t know about her partner\u2019s escapades discretes<\/em>, when they seem to have been going on for two years and were talked about all over Paris.<\/p>\n Despite the huge expansion in psychiatric conditions in DSM V, \u201cles blues<\/em>\u201d or \u201creaction after being told that your partner is having an affair\u201d have not made it to disease status. Would your local GP request that you be admitted to an NHS hospital with such a diagnosis? I imagine too that Trierweiler is not in a routine psychiatric hospital but something much more pleasant.<\/p>\n Trierweiler is reminding us that hospitals can be places of sanctuary. It may not be true of the hospitals we know best, the total institutions with bed pans clattering and inmates having a 10% chance of being harmed. Rather this is hospital as in the archaic \u201chospice for travellers or pilgrims.\u201d We might easily add the lovesick and broken hearted. Because we are in France, I think of the H\u00f4pitaux \u00e0 Beaune, an exquisite 15th century building that each year hosts an auction of Burgundy wines.<\/p>\n Probably the sanctuary that Trierweiler needed most was not from disease, but from the media and nosey colleagues. This is a grand example of what sociologists call the \u201csick role,\u201d something we all learn unconsciously as children. If I tell my mother I have a stomach ache, then she will sympathise, care for me, and let me off school, whereas if I tell her I simply don\u2019t want to go to school she\u2019ll scold me and send me anyway. Even the most invasive media will not burst into the hospital and ask awkward questions.<\/p>\n Originally Trierweiler, a journalist herself, was expected to be released after a couple of days, but she is still there as I write, more than a week after Hollande\u2019s affair was exposed. She is said to \u201chave had tests\u201d and be suffering from \u201clow blood pressure,\u201d one of those continental diseases that Anglo Saxon doctors don\u2019t recognise. Occam\u2019s razor suggests that the tests are not necessary and that her low blood pressure is not the real problem.<\/p>\n But what caught my attention the most was the assertion that doctors had said that she should not see the president, providing an alternative explanation to the possibilities that the president was heartless or a coward or that she was too furious to see him. Doctors forbidding the President and the First Girlfriend to meet is the old fashioned kind of doctoring, familiar from plays and films, where doctors take charge and take the boldest decisions on behalf of patients: \u201cPut her to bed immediately, give her this sedative, and insist she doesn\u2019t see anybody or get out of bed for a week.\u201d This is a huge distance from the shared decision making that is modern medicine. That the doctors issued such a command is not believable, although I\u2019ve not seen the media question it. That the media still believe that\u2019s the way that doctors operate may reflect the fantasy of ceasing to have to take responsibility.<\/p>\n The doctors are clearly being used. What next? \u201cDoctors insist, it is reported, that the president should marry his new girlfriend, Ms Trierweiler is given a generous pension and officially named as Second Girlfriend, and the French media say nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n