Our third call was to the local council estate for a middle aged man who was, apparently, feeling depressed and suicidal. Now I like psychiatric patients. Maybe it’s because I’m a bit nuts too, but I seem to have a certain affinity with them and often find myself having long, drawn out chats with them on quiet night shifts.
We rang the intercom and Raymond, our patient, unhurriedly let us in. Silently, he beckoned us into his bedroom, flopped on to the bed and sighed. I wasn’t surprised he was depressed; his bedroom was one of the most depressing places I have ever been in. Walls stained nicotine brown, carpet sticky, furniture ancient, it was severely in need of a make over.
“So, Raymond, what seems to be the problem today?” said Steve cheerily.
“I’m feeling very depressed,” said Raymond in a flat drone. “Worn out and worthless. I shouldn’t be here. I need to be in a home. With people looking after me.”
“Well, I’m afraid we can’t take you to a home,” said Steve. “Do you want to go to A+E? Or have you been an inpatient at a psychiatric hospital before? We can contact them and see if they will take you back?”
“I don’t want to go to A+E,” whined Raymond. “They can’t do anything for me. And you have to sit there for hours. And I’ve been in the psychiatric hospital too. I don’t want to go back there. I tell you, I need to be in a home.”
I couldn’t see any reason why Raymond should need to be in a care home, but it is not the ambulance crew’s job to question this, so Steve suggested to Raymond that he should see someone who could arrange a care home - his GP. Steve’s crewmate rang the GP for an urgent appointment, and Steve told Raymond that we’d run him up to the GP surgery in the ambulance.
“Can you take me back home too?” muttered Raymond.
“Sorry, no - we’ll be sent on another job as soon as we drop you off,” said Steve.
“I don’t think I’ll go, then,” huffed Raymond. “It’s too far to walk. And I can’t afford a taxi.” The GP surgery was actually five minutes’ walk away, and Raymond had no noticeable mobility difficulties.
“Well, what would you like us to do then?” said Steve. “Is there someone we can call for you or something else we can do?”
“I’ve told you,” said Raymond. “I need to be in a home. I don’t know why I bothered calling you. You can’t help me. No one wants to help me. The whole NHS is useless.”
“Raymond,” said Steve, with an admirable show of patience. “I can’t help you get into a care home, because we’re an emergency ambulance crew and we take people to A+E. But I’ve told you how you might be able to get into one, and you don’t seem interested. We can’t help you unless you want to help yourself.”
“No,” said Raymond. “Thank you, but I don’t think I’ll bother. It’s just not going to work out.” And he opened the door and motioned for us to leave.
Since we’d made the appointment with Raymond’s GP, we decided to go anyway, even if our patient was not with us. We piled into the surgery and a very harassed looking GP sat us down, pulled Raymond’s details up on his computer and turned the screen round to face us. I could see that Raymond rang the surgery several times a day, usually demanding to be put in a care home but occasionally wanting other things done for him too. He had a history of not taking his medications and of accusing the doctors of mistreating him in various ways. He would be deliberately misleading about what the other doctors had said to him on previous visits, and because of this he was now only allowed to see one doctor (who I assume drew the short straw).
“Raymond’s been assessed and we don’t believe he needs to be in a home,” said the doctor. “He needs to comply with his care plan and start taking responsibility for his own health. I’ll give him a call when you leave, but it’s nothing he hasn’t heard a thousand times before.”
I found Raymond to be a most perplexing character. On one hand, I know it is the nature of depression that patients feel everything is hopeless and won’t work and that would partly account for why he was so unco-operative. On the other hand, and I know this is a total cliche and supposedly the worst thing you can ever say to a depressed person, but I really did want to say “Pull yourself together! Take some responsibility for yourself! You don’t need looking after, you need to look after yourself. No one else is responsible for the way you feel but you!” I know how the whole argument goes, Raymond can’t help being depressed, it’s an illness, you wouldn’t say that to someone who had cancer, would you? The thing is that while I agree that it is and illness and he can’t help having it in the first place, he can change the way he deals with it. You wouldn’t say “pull yourself together” to someone with cancer because you don’t need to. Anyone I’ve ever known who has had cancer has been determined to fight it. They grasp any opportunity to make themselves better and take any treatment, however painful or expensive. Whereas Raymond just wanted to lie back whilst someone else sorted out his life. Perhaps I should be more sympathetic. Perhaps I couldn’t possibly understand unless I was in his position. But then I thought back to Elaine, the old lady with the broken hip, and how brave she was and how thankful she was for our help, and I didn’t worry about Raymond any more.
