Let Me Not Be Mad by A K Benjamin

Author:A K Benjamin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

Murray

‘So, what are you going to do with the rest of your life?’

I’d never heard that question before, hovering close to cliché and thumping me with its gravity at the same time. Certainly nobody had ever asked me it, nor had I ever put it to myself. It was his opening gambit, the first thing he said the first time we met, on a balmy evening in July, three months after my father died. I couldn’t face ‘counselling’, so I agreed with my line manager to ‘clinical supervision’ with Dr Murray Simon – the label makes all the difference. I’d had many supervisors in the past, but none like this. Early in my career it had been fortnightly. I was still supposed to have a dedicated hour every month but though Lewis and I listened to each other talk about cases, I hadn’t seen anyone formally for years. I felt the consequences more and more: unchallenged, my work staled, followed a template learned long ago that hadn’t been updated, with limited, limiting beliefs about what was possible.

To be honest it was more than that; my sense of self was untethering, the Binding Problem had become personal. A patient I had recently been seeing suddenly stopped coming without notice. He was an interesting man, good company, idiosyncratic, certainly more articulate than many of the neurologically devastated men and women I spend my time with. I took it personally. Rather than cancel his weekly appointments I used the time to write the story of what might have driven him from my room, filling it out week after week with details about the different pressures on him, his character, its strengths and weaknesses, its secrets, until I had a journal’s worth of notes. Writing down my memories of him, memories I didn’t even have, somehow mollified the loss. It also sprang an unacknowledged genie from its bottle. In writing about him I had stumbled on a silent partner – a prisoner even – I recognised from many of the patients I see, who slips out urgent messages-in-a-bottle while the respectable part says all is well. One evening the line manager knocked and opened the door. I was sitting in the room without the light on staring at an empty chair, my notebook open in front of me. She thought she had heard me talking to someone from outside. She had come to tell me, in her blunt, realistic manner, that certain more long-term interventions – like this one – would have to be cut because of budgetary pressures. The sessions with my imagined patient would have to finish. I surprised myself with my display of controlled outrage: did she have any idea how catastrophic this might be for his already fragile identity … ?

If I was my doctor and had to formulate this outlandish behaviour I would have pointed to various predisposing, precipitating and perpetuating factors, among them the attrition of working with a patient group of whom the vast majority only deteriorated,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.