Doctors and the Stockholm Syndrome

On August 23, 1973, a 32-year-old career criminal by the name of Jan-Erik Olsson, who had just escaped from prison, entered a bank in Stockholm, Sweden, along with an accomplice, and began firing off his machine gun, announcing to a group of startled bank employees, “The party has just begun!” The employees had sticks of dynamite strapped to their bodies and were held hostage until they were finally rescued five days later. What makes this story particularly fascinating—to me and to a number of psychologists who’ve studied other hostage-taking scenarios—is the rather shocking and totally unexpected attitude the hostages exhibited following their release. In media interview after media interview, all four of the hostages showed support for their captors and empathized with them. Even more bizarrely, the bank employees were fearful of those who’d come to their rescue, believing irrationally that the robbers were actually protecting them from the police. During a phone call from the vault with Sweden’s prime minister, one of the captives even implored the PM to provide a getaway car so the hostages could leave the bank along with the kidnappers.Read: Stephen Skyvington: Doctor bashing and the politics of envy“So, what does all this have to do with doctors?” you’re probably wondering. Good question. Let me try to provide an answer. Having worked closely with physicians for the past 30 years, I’ve come to the conclusion that doctors here in Canada are suffering from a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome. To prove this, I’m going to share with you some inside information that’s not generally known to the public. We’re going to have to travel all the way back to 1994—the year before Mike Harris and his Progressive Conservative Party tried to bring common sense to Ontario. In 1994, Dr. Hugh Scully and a group of prominent Ontario doctors produced a report that called for, among other things, a parallel private healthcare system. You heard me right. The hybrid healthcare system that I and others are so vocally advocating for had its beginnings in the Scully Report. As previously mentioned, three months after I began working at the Ontario Medical Association, Harris and his fellow common-sense revolutionaries surprised just about everyone by winning a majority, defeating both the Liberals and the NDP by a wide margin. Within the OMA, there was a great deal of debate as to when would be the right time to present the new premier with his own copy of the Scully Report. Just as Rome burned while Nero fiddled, however, things were happening behind the scenes, and voilà, before anyone knew what was happening, finance minister Ernie Eves stood in the legislature and introduced the Savings and Restructuring Act—an enabling piece of legislation that would, in effect, give several ministers, including the newly installed health minister Jim Wilson, the right to play God. One thing that’s not generally known is that in the original version of the bill the OMA was going to be legislated out of existence. The new government also stated they would no longer cover any portion of doctors’ malpractice insurance fees.Following a series of very public skirmishes, including a rather effective job action undertaken by the province’s obstetricians and gynecologists, who refused to take on any more pregnant patients unless the government changed its mind about their malpractice insurance fees, the OMA and the Harris government eventually hammered out a new Physician Services Agreement in 1997—one that would allow the medical profession to “co-manage” Ontario’s healthcare system through the Physician Services Committee.This was it, right there. The moment when things could have gone one way, but instead went the other. Doctors, beaten and abused and obviously worn out, caved in and agreed to help fix healthcare by co-managing the system. I remember the sense of jubilation inside OMA headquarters. Everyone there—including me, I’ll admit—thought we’d actually pulled off something of a coup. Co-managing Ontario’s healthcare system. Wow! What more could you ask for—especially if you were a special interest group like the Ontario Medical Association? Unfortunately, as we saw with those Stockholm bank employees, snuggling up with those who may not have your best interests at heart is a poor idea at best and a dangerous one at worst. For not only would the province’s doctors do everyone a huge disservice in the years to come by propping up our crumbling healthcare system so our elected officials could continue to perpetrate the myth that our country has the best system in the world, they also fell asleep at the switch and failed to realize they were being recruited by the Harris government to weed out fraud—something Wilson was obsessed with. Thus, when the CPSO’s Medical Review Committee began ramping up its activities in 1999, the OMA turned a blind eye to what was going on, assuming that if their partners in managing the healthcare system felt doctors were guilty of ripping off the system, then those doctors must indeed be guilty.Stephen Skyvington was the former manager of government relations for the Ontario Medical Association. His book, This May Hurt A Bit: Reinventing Canada's Health Care System, was published in 2019 by Dundurn Press.

Doctors and the Stockholm Syndrome

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