Flight into the Wilderness as a Psychiatric Syndromet (1967)
Abstract:
The motivations of people who are drawn to the remaining frontiers of the world range from the adventurously realistic to the patently psychotic, with infinite graduates in between. This paper is concerned with a clinical syndrome presented by persons who appear to have fled into the arid wilderness in an attempt to solve their problems. Since the future of many countries depends on the development of their frontiers, it is important to understand the dynamics of the various kinds of people who struggle in these difficult and distant zones, and to provide such professional help as their unique situation may require. Psychiatry in Australia, as elsewhere, clings conservatively to the cities, uninvolved with the adjustment problems that characterize a frontier. Yet a twentieth-century frontier should scarcely have to await population growth in competitions with a city of its health services; psychiatry should instead be included in the technology necessary for man to master zones where interaction with the environment is especially difficult.