When Your Private Shrink Parts
I was young and naïve – I admit it. Well, what’s worse is that I wasn’t that young – just naïve.
We met at Withington Hospital first, then he suggested it would be better if I saw him at his practice in the city centre. It would be more convenient. Fewer people would see us together. This suited me; I agreed. Money was not mentioned.
An appointment was arranged, and off I went. It was a pleasant place; the most obvious thing about it was that I had the waiting room to myself. Normally I’d have expected to wait for about an hour in the company of other persons, inevitably boorish or even embarrassing types with disturbing proclivities I would rather not know about.
It was very pleasant to be ushered into his office by his receptionist almost as soon as I arrived. The office looked impressive – and expensive. I think his desk may have been leather-topped. I was given a chair with arms to sit in. I wondered how he could afford to run an opulent place like this while still seeing people the state paid him a reduced fee for; I felt unduly privileged that he should give me this degree of consideration, instead of providing his services at the far less salubrious National Health Service establishment of Withington Hospital.
I was still more impressed by his courtesy and his willingness to listen. He even wrote down notes from time to time! I felt pampered. Of course I wasn’t sure what he was actually writing, but it might have been about me – I felt sure it was at least about one of his clients, or at least his profession.
He even appeared to be intelligent, and to know what he was talking about – though, given the lack of knowledge required for his work, I had to admit this didn’t mean all that much. Nevertheless I felt I liked him; I would like to see him again.
The meeting lasted for exactly thirty minutes, then I arranged another appointment with him for the following week before leaving his splendid office.
His receptionist was waiting, a piece of paper in her hand. I took it. It was a bill for £30.
Ah! Oh! (And that, dear reader, was not unfortunately the sound of me reaching a deeply satisfying orgasm.)
Realisation had come. What a dreadfully embarrassing misunderstanding! And my fault too, no doubt. I blushed. Trying to cover my discomfiture I fumbled for my wallet – fortunately I had just enough cash with me. The receptionist seemed slightly surprised to be presented with hard currency, nonplussed even, but forced herself to accept it and wrote ‘PAID’ followed by her signature – someone’s signature anyway – across the bill. I still have it. I occasionally consider having it framed.
Though I wasn’t too pleased to be paying for something which so many other men got free, I decided it was not the time to be awkward and insist on the matter. After all, there was no doubt he was a congenial fellow, and it was nice to just go straight into his office, without any embarrassing mixing with other clients, even wealthy ones, so I continued.
I continued until it became obvious to me that We Were Not Making Progress. Well, he was making progress; he by now had £150 of my money in only a couple of months. But he was absorbing my money at a faster rate than I was accruing it. He was charging £1 a minute. Each twenty-minute encounter with him amounted to roughly what I got every week. What I felt was even more insulting was the fact that I was paying him to listen to me. He only contributed the occasional question or remark. I was no longer finding the conversation stimulating. I realised I did not wish to carry on meeting him forever. I wanted there to be other men in my life.
So I put it to him that there was little point in our continuing to see each other. He frowned. It was the first sign that our relationship was not as close as it had been when we had first met. I pointed out to him that I would be unable to meet him for much longer anyway, as my meagre savings were fast running out. He looked momentarily uncomfortable – for about a quarter of a second perhaps – before asking me sternly which was more important to me: his deep care for me, or mere money? How could I say such a thing?
But I had by now lost my respect for him. He now seemed a shallow and transparent parody of the man I had once known. He was clearly the one who only wanted money for what he gave me. How could I ever have found him attractive?
I said that if he could give me a reasonable assurance that he could perform the duties he had implied he could when we first met then I was prepared to pay him. Surely someone in his profession could accept that?
What? Cure me? What kind of thing was that to say to a psychiatrist? I almost felt sorry for him in his moment of despair. He wanted to see me. He needed to see me. How could I be so cruel to him?
But by now I was adamant. I pressed the point. Would he honour that promise? He crumbled. He could not. It was over. We parted and never saw each other again.
His name? It was Doctor Hore.
NOTES
This is the last of three entries regarding my experiences of the psychiatric profession in Britain from the late 1970s to the early 1990s; first I satirised the public sector in That Shrinking Feeling, then took a more studied and sombre look at life for the patients in Parkside Hospital in Don’t Drink the Tea, then, finally, this rather close-to-life satire of private practice.
Was I fair? Obviously a satire is not intended to be fair so much as to demonstrate uncomfortable realities, and in that respect I was fair; I represented things accurately, albeit in a humorous way. Things have changed since 1977, and have continued to change; my last face-to-face meeting with a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist was in the early 1990s, and things have changed since then. But I suspect it will be a long time – certainly not in my lifetime – before there will be a cure, or even a treatment with a high success rate for conditions like mine.
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