Up close and personal with psychosis. A Short Story. Prahran, 1981.

An alternative title for ‘Up close and personal with psychosis’ could be ‘the dangers of not having a friend in the world.’ Would things have turned out differently for Dr Resnick if he had a close friend with whom he could share his troubles?

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Transcript

Up close and personal with psychosis. A Short Story.

Prahran, September 1981

Alfred Hospital staff cafeteria,6pm.

Alex and I are sitting at a small laminex topped table, eating our evening meal. Alex is on call tonight, so he won’t be coming home until tomorrow evening. He’s in the College of Physicians training program, working as a Gastroenterology registrar at the Alfred. I’m just meeting him for dinner in passing, and I’m lucky enough to be going straight home afterwards. We’ve been married for a little over a year now and our small cottage in Brighton is quite cosy. My job this year is Anatomy Demonstrator at Monash University. I’m teaching second and third-year medical students Anatomy by day, and in the evenings attending lectures and teaching sessions myself at the Eye and Ear Hospital in an effort to get into the Ophthalmology training program next year. I think my chances of this are slim. It’s very competitive.

 I see Michael Resnick approaching our table. He looks distracted. Is he talking to himself? He’s another overseas trained doctor, from the UK, I believe. He’s here in Melbourne for a year finishing his fellowship training as a senior registrar in general medicine. He has sat with us before at the cafeteria for a meal.

 “Hi, Michael,” I say, “Come and sit and eat with us.”

After Michael has sat down, Alex’s pager rings and he leaves the table to go to answer it.

I can hear Michael still mumbling to himself while he’s chewing his food.

“How are you, Mike?” I say, feeling a little embarrassed for him talking to himself. I want to interrupt him to get him to stop it.

“They’re keeping me awake all night,” Mike said to his food, “I can’t sleep. I’m dead tired all the time, but I can’t sleep. Michael was certainly not talking to me. He didn’t look up, he just kept on eating.

“Who’s keeping you awake?” I asked.

“They’re watching me all the time. When I turn on the TV, they can see me, so I keep it turned off,” he mumbled again not answering my question.

I knew Michael had come to Melbourne from the UK, in January this year to take up his hospital position. I always thought he was very intelligent. I mean, you had to be, to get a senior Reg post at the Alfred coming from overseas. The spots were very competitive. Michael always kept to himself and didn’t seem to have any friends. I knew he had come to Australia alone, no girlfriend or wife with him. He had told me previously that he lived in a small flat in St Kilda, not far from the hospital. He’d been here for about eight months now. That’s eight months working long shifts at the hospital. He’s an introvert who hasn’t made any friends and now he isn’t sleeping at all and he’s saying some pretty weird stuff, I thought.

“They’re up in the ceiling listening with bugs,” he continued. “I’ve been up in the manhole trying to catch them but they always hide so I can’t see them. I’ve turned my flat upside down trying to find the bugs (listening devices, I presumed) but they hide them really well.”

“Are you working tonight?”, I asked. 

“No, I’m just eating here and I don’t really want to go home either,” he said quite angrily as if it was my fault he was being ‘bugged’.

 At this point, Alex came back to the table after getting his pager message and at the same time Michael got up to go back and get some dessert from the counter.

“I’ve got to go now to the ward but you stay here and finish your meal,” Alex said to me.

“I’ve just been listening to Michael Resnick and he thinks his apartment is bugged. He can’t sleep because he thinks there are people in his ceiling, through the manhole, listening to him. Alex, I think he’s actually psychotic,” I said once Michael was out of earshot.

“Alice, seriously, it’s not our problem. You probably heard incorrectly,” Alex replied authoritatively as if I was the one who was psychotic.

Alex left and I kept eating my meal. When Michael received his dessert, he didn’t even come back to my table. He just wondered over to another empty table to finish his meal.

Well, that was rude, I thought. Maybe I have got it wrong about his mental state. But all the psych training we’d had as medical students was telling me he’s having a breakdown.

 The next morning I’m having my breakfast alone at home with Alex still at work after the night on call and I’m listening to the news.

“A 26-year-old man was taken into custody late last night after wandering naked down Fitzroy Street, St Kilda. It’s thought to be a schizophrenic episode and the police took him to Mont Park Psychiatric hospital.”

 On my way to work, I rang Alex and asked him if he had heard the news. He told me it was indeed, Dr Michael Resnick, that had been certified and admitted to Mont Park.

 That evening when we had both finished work, we decided to go to Mont Park Asylum for the insane, to see Michael. I was fairly sure we were his only ‘friends’.

When we entered the hospital, we introduced ourselves to his treating psychiatrist.

“Yeah, you can go in and see him,” the doctor said. “He’s still immobilised. He got pretty violent last night, when we admitted him. Seems he thought some people had bugged his clothing. So, he had to take it all off to get rid of the bugs. We’ve chemically sedated him as well. So, you won’t get much out of him. Seems his only relatives are in the UK. Doesn’t know a soul here. I can’t believe he was holding down a medical reg job at the Alfred. He’s definitely nuts.”

 We entered Michael’s hospital room and saw him slumped in the far corner, in a big hospital lounge chair. He appeared to be bundled up in some sort of ‘straight jacket’ that also bound him to the chair. His arms and legs were wrapped up so he couldn’t move them. His chin was slumped down and eyes closed.

I touched him on the shoulder and spoke to him, trying to get a response or some recognition of who we were. There was none.

 We sat there with him for about fifteen minutes and then saw it was useless. He didn’t know us, or where he was. He was very drugged up and drifting back into sleep regularly. Not much Alex and I could do. We had to leave it to the psychiatrists now.

 We never saw Michael Resnick again. We heard he was an inpatient at Mont Park for six months before heading straight back to the UK to his family. I don’t know how long it would be before he would be fit to practice medicine again, if ever? Such a young man, in the early stages of a potentially brilliant career. I wonder what brought on his madness. Was it genetic? Did it run in his family? Or was it precipitated by long nights on call at the Alfred with very little sleep and a mountain of stress, looking after desperately sick people and their families. Let alone the stress from his superiors, the consultant doctors, on the unit. Would it be different if he had had a friend to talk to in the evening rather than returning to his flat at night, alone. Maybe if he had stayed in the UK where he had family and a support structure around him, it may not have happened? 

 Whenever I think about the story of Dr Michael Resnick, it brings to mind that friends can be really important. It’s good to have at least one or two that you can rely on and make sure that you are there for them too.