Читать книгу Battle Scarred - Anthony Feinstein - Страница 5

As a medical officer working in the psychiatric unit during my national service in the early 1980s, I assessed and treated hundreds of soldiers, both in South Africa and up on the border in Owamboland, Namibia. After my two years of conscription were up, I was called up for month-long camps at small units set up on the outskirts of the Sebokeng and Sharpeville townships. Throughout these periods I kept diaries and I have returned to them for the material in this memoir.

It may surprise the reader to learn that psychiatry is filled with the mundane. This is not to trivialise a single patient’s illness, but the common disorders repeat with monotonous regularity. My memoir bypasses those patients with lesser degrees of sadness, anxiety and irritability, and instead focuses on the few case histories in which the floridness of the symptoms left an indelible impression. The scenario in which the serviceman takes ill also comes into play, for life in the military follows a rigid set of constructs that a man who has lost his mind cannot fathom. It is this startling clash between iron-clad discipline and reality overturned that first seized my attention early in my service, and the fascination has never left me.

Writing about patients demands tact even after the passage of many decades. Confidentiality cannot be betrayed. To meet this challenge, I have changed names and altered identities. In some instances timelines have been concertinaed or condensed, while for certain patients geographical locations have been shifted, surrounding events altered and distinguishing characteristics modified. These attempts at deliberate obfuscation are necessary to maintain the anonymity of those who entered my consulting room and trusted me with their most intimate histories. At times I have applied this reworking to some of my colleagues as well. In making all these changes I have allowed myself a degree of latitude.

The dialogue as it appears owes everything to reconstruction, imperfect recall and poetic licence. None of it is based on verbatim quotation. What has not been touched, however, is the case material itself. Signs and symptoms and the manner in which they were revealed remain true to the notes as I recorded them on the day.

ANTHONY FEINSTEIN