How Trivial Is Trivial

This question is, I feel, in the same kind of idiot category as how long is a piece of string? interviewed recently by a journalist planning to write an article about the women (like me) who conduct 'Auntie' columns in women's magazines, I was asked what proportion of the letters I received each week could be labelled trivial. Her eyebrows shot up when I said that in my view, no human problem was trivial?even the recurring one of the teenage girl who begs for advice about how to rekindle interest in her boy friend who has neglected for a whole week to ring her up. Of course, there are degrees of misery, but no human misery, I feel, can be shrugged off on the grounds of apparent triviality. The interesting question of the degrees of triviality caused me to become embroiled, a few months ago, with the angry wife of a doctor?a general practitioner in Essex. And the coldly furious correspondence resulted in the publication of one of my letters in The Lancet, which in turn involved me in further hot argument about triviality. The doctor's wife accused me of telling troubled readers to take what she described as 'trivial prob-lems' to their family doctor. "Do you really think,' wrote the aggressive lady (who described herself as horrified and even disgusted), 'that a doctor should be involved in petty domestic quarrels?' Furthermore, she pointed out, general practitioners are already overloaded with work and one of the reasons their surgeries are overcrowded is because of the gratuitous advice given to the public by people like me with no medical training. She stated that it is very difficult for people who are genuinely ill to get their doctors to treat them, on account of how the doctors are so busy dealing with what she described as 'minor emotional upsets'. The fact is that a large number of the people who write to me?a newspaper columnist and a stranger ?are middle-aged or elderly neurotics who would, in my view, never have reached the stage where they needed help from a stranger if they could have taken their 'petty domestic problems' and 'minor emotional upsets' to a doctor who would listen to them with sympathy and understanding. In the few years I have been running my advice column in a woman's magazine, I estimate that I have received something like a quarter of a …