Meeting Jesus Christ and a werewolf ? It’s

336pp, Jonathan Cape, £16.99 (0808 196 6794), RRP£18.99, ebook £9.99

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The phone rang at 4am. “Got one for you,” a harassed A&E matron told Benji Waterhouse – the only on-call psychiatrist covering three London boroughs with a population of one million souls that night. A 34-year-old man had jumped from a structure known locally as “Suicide Bridge”. The patient’s physical injuries were slight because some thorn bushes had broken his fall. But he was telling A&E medics that his best friend had died the previous day and he was still determined to kill himself.

Although aware it sounded callous, Waterhouse’s first question was a practical one: “Which side of the bridge did he jump from?” If the patient had been facing south then his care would be landed on the caseload of a different psychiatrist. But if he’d been facing north, then Waterhouse (whose shift had already included tending to a series of addicts and overdosers along with an anorexic girl, an army veteran with PTSD and a man who wanted his ears surgically removed to stop the voices) would have to abandon his first hot drink of the night and head back to A&E.

This is the anecdote with which Waterhouse begins his humorous and humane book about the challenges of treating unbalanced minds (without losing his own) in the modern NHS. It’s a psychiatrist’s version of Adam Kay’s junior doctor’s memoir This is Going to Hurt (2017), which works as a powerful reminder of the pressures under which decent, hardworking and inevitably fallible medics are trying to care for the rest of us. Waterhouse describes an underfunded and overstretched system which doesn’t take many years to reduce a sweetly idealistic young empath to shunting on patients whose