Free Tristimania by Jay Griffiths Page B

so helpful. It seems important, particularly because so many people in manic-depressive crisis feel acutely aware of what goes wrong with their medical care. So: what did he do right?
    He listened, deeply. I felt as if he let my words into his mind, so that he could re-hear my words right inside himself and re-listen if necessary. There was a musicality to his empathy. He heard in resonances, making of himself the sympathetic string. I felt utterly – unbelievably – understood. Because he listened to my metaphors, I felt he was willing to walk with me in the landscapes of my mind. When I was stranded up a mountain, the one thing that kept me safe was a slender but strong rope which he held, and I trusted him not to let it go. It seems significant that many people in manic-depressive crisis, including me, speak of ropes, lifelines, threads and linking things, because this madness is sharply focused on connection and disconnection, from the neural pathways of the mind to the Trickster paths and the relational pathways between people. In the weirdscape I walked in, he was my lead climber, guiding in line with the etymological heart of doctoring. He toldme the etymology of ‘doctor’, from docere : to lead, guide or teach; to hold someone’s hand and guide them through an illness. I was moved that this quintessential doctor should be the person who told me the quintessential meaning of his gift.
    Hermes’ staff, the caduceus, is the symbol of Western medicine, and the gifts of Hermes are related to medicine, including, as Zoë Playdon writes in Medicine’s Original Psychodrama : ‘the exercise of professional judgement, living with uncertainty, minute by minute, hour by hour, staying open to sudden changes, coping with twists and turns, and still finding the best route to health and wholeness for each individual patient. It is Hermes the compassionate Imagination who is the guide within the clinical encounter, drawing out the patient narratives and the doctor’s responses.’
    Manic depression is a tricky illness and people feel (and are) in a place of danger. My doctor gave me a sense of utter safety and protection, of being, in that tender phrase, ‘under his care’. I had a kind of fantasy sometimes that he’d just wrap me up in a tartan blanket and put me in his pocket for a few months and then, in time, I’d be okay, with the osmosis of a kind, sane mind.
    There was him, there was me, and there was a third place, the place between, where I could take my helplessly fluttering mind and huddle, safe, holding tight to the rope. He was ‘there for me’ in that simple phrase of pure gold. He made himself available, reachable. A couple of times, I felt I couldn’t wait for an appointment and wrote scrawled messages for him which I left at reception. A couple of times I phoned. Each time, he responded, and fast. He didn’t shunt me off to the circus of serial strangers which so many psychiatric patients experience, and I was grateful for that to the bottom of my heart. He was the NHS at its best.
    â€˜We ought to take pride in the fact that, despite our financial andeconomic anxieties, we are still able to do the most civilised thing in the world – put the welfare of the sick before every other consideration,’ said Aneurin Bevan, father of the NHS. Meanwhile, during that awful year, when I saw my doctor for dozens of appointments, the Tory prime minister was suggesting that people should have just one free doctor’s appointment per year. ‘If the Tories get in again,’ my doctor said with real feeling, ‘there’ll be no NHS.’
    The mind, in manic-depressive breakdown, is precarious, fallible and mutable. It swoops, soars and slips. Flight collides with fall and the falls are brutal, breaking, bruising. But even the falls do not stay still. Cadences glitter in false certainty – ‘all that is solid melts into air’