57 years right, and proud of it

You’re supposed to learn something new every day, which is tough on us omniscients. But yesterday I went for a walk with a psychiatrist and I learned not only a new word but also that 57 years ago I was right.

We walked around a lake where old men were playing with radio-controlled yachts. Freud would have made something of it, but I was too busy telling my companion that the human mind is a vast and mysterious ocean and that a psychiatrist is a blind fisherman in a very small boat.

She replied that neither blindness nor a small boat is much handicap to a fisherman and besides, you can’t catch a fish without putting to sea. I chose to settle for a draw.

We went on to discuss depression, shingles and Timaru, as you do. Along the way I learned that every psychiatrist, before becoming one, has to train as a conventional doctor. ‘‘So you know all about proper illnesses too,’’ I said.

‘‘Mental illnesses are proper illnesses,’’ she said, and I said, ‘‘Yes, of course they are, but you know what I mean.’’

She said most people only took an interest in their own illnesses and that some people were unlucky and got most illnesses, while others were lucky and got few. I said I belonged in the latter category, praise the lord. Moreover, one of the very few illnesses I’d suffered from had been misdiagnosed, but no-one had ever believed me. It still rankled.

‘‘Tell me all about it,’’ she said in a tone that had me looking around for a couch. I considered borrowing a deckchair from one of the old boaties but in the end we just walked and talked.

‘‘I was seven years old,’’ I said, ‘‘and I developed an affliction not dissimilar to the whirling pits.’’ ‘‘The whirling pits?’’

‘‘You know,’’ I said, ‘‘when you lie down drunk and the room spins so violently that you have to sit up to avoid being overcome by nausea. Or don’t psychiatrists get drunk?’’

‘‘Oh, those whirling pits,’’ she said.

‘‘I found increasingly that when I closed my eyes at night the furniture in the room would swell up, rotate and come at me. It was terrifying. Any attempt at sleep, and I’d be attacked by giant spinning chests of drawers. Worse, though, was that no-one believed me, not even my mother. Eventually, however, I wailed so long and so committedly that the doctor was called.

‘‘Dr Moore did a little perfunctory listening to my story, went at me with his stethoscope and then declared that I was suffering from, wait for it, a chest infection.

‘‘I wasn’t then familiar with the Americanism ‘bulls...’ but it captures precisely my sentiments of the moment. ‘How could an infection of the chest…’ I began, but my mother shushed me and thanked the doctor and that was that. I had a chest infection.’’

‘‘And what happened?’’

‘‘It wore off, slowly, but for years I still got vestigial hints of it at bedtime, just as I drifted towards sleep, a spinning table or a swelling desk.’’ ‘‘Hypnagogy,’’ said the psychiatrist. ‘‘Bless you.’’

‘‘No, no, that’s what it was, hypnagogy. The experience of realistic hallucinations in the transitional phase between wake and sleep. It’s quite common.’’

‘‘Really?’’

‘‘Oh yes. Especially when you’re young. It can be terrifying.’’

‘‘So 57 years ago I was right and everyone else, including the very proper doctor, was wrong?’’ ‘‘Oh yes.’’

The sun shone, the lake sparkled, and the old men played with their boats.