All in a day’s work for this frazzled NHS psychiatrist
desperate leaps into the darkness occur inches beyond his catchment area.
He is likeably frank about how growing up in a dysfunctional family led him to specialise in mental health. His experience of loving – and trying to make sense of – complex people also means he sees his patients as whole humans. Although he’s expected to diagnose – or reject – people with brisk acronyms from his psychiatric textbooks, he notices the wider situational context.
Is it any wonder that people with limited education and poor prospects, living in high crime neighbourhoods and experiencing discrimination are depressed, anxious or fleeing into alternative realities? Waterhouse suspects he could reasonably diagnose some of these people as “PNA” (Pretty Normal Actually) but suffering from “SLS” (“S--- Life Syndrome”). Readers’ hearts will break for the young woman who was abused by her father but still has “DAD” tattooed on her body because he loved her in his own way. She turns her anger inward, carving self-loathing words into her legs, but the NHS doesn’t have space for her and she is repeatedly sent back onto the streets and into the arms of abusive boyfriends.
Waterhouse introduces us to patients with all kinds of fascinating delusions, from a lorry driver who thinks he’s found a cure for coronavirus to a man who believes he’s a werewolf. All these people are described with compassion. But Waterhouse – who also performs stand-up comedy – believes humour is an essential coping mechanism, and repeatedly finds the funny without turning patients into punchlines. “You shouldn’t judge people from appearances,” he writes, but admits that when he was sent to look for the guy who believes himself to be Jesus Christ (sectioned after attempting to walk on water at a local swimming pool) he quickly suspected his new patient might be “the barefoot one in the white robe with the long hair”.
Although Waterhouse’s book offers a grim insight into the brusque treatment of mentally unwell people by the modern NHS, it is still strangely uplifting. It’s a warm-hearted reminder that the system is still staffed by many people doing their darnedest to connect with and care for people who – at first glance – appear damaged and dangerous beyond hope.