PSYCHIATRY AT ITS CORE… KALUM AMARASURIYA

When I left RGS in 1997 to study Medicine at Newcastle, I had soft focus visions of debonair righteousness and being deeply admired purely by virtue of being a doctor. Although such delusions of grandeur have long since been expunged, I would still say being a psychiatrist is a great job and my experiences at the RGS played a pivotal role in how I ended up becoming one.

I always enjoyed Biology, and lessons with the effervescent Mr Williams (91-96) fuelled my interest. I think I had a vague sense I should do something ‘useful’, so possibly through a lack of imagination rather than anything else, thought medicine seemed like the right career choice.

Although every doctor’s training experiences are different, my reflections after meandering through various junior doctor jobs was that: kindness was rare and precious; camaraderie a saviour; but dispiritingly, lack of time and the feeling of pressure was eroding my compassion and curiosity. I felt I needed seriously to think about what specialty I should pursue in the long term that would not drive me insane or inhuman. I turned to psychiatry.

After a while in psychiatry I noticed a real difference in how I was able to work compared to my time in other specialities. It felt like I was working with other members of the team, not in parallel to them. The nature of the work and treatment allowed for creativity as well as the practical application of neuroscience and pharmacology, while not losing sight of the patient as a whole and unique individual. I later specialised in the Psychiatry of Intellectual Disabilities as I felt it was the most fascinating and rewarding branch of psychiatry. I continue to encounter a huge variety of diverse clinical and medico-legal situations and am fortunate to work in a range of settings with many different people. I don’t have many typical days and there are always new and unexpected challenges. The most satisfying thing about my job is being in a position to meaningfully help improve someone’s quality of life, especially when they are often already marginalised and misunderstood.

At the time I applied to study medicine there was an assumption that you should do a full set of science A Levels. However, with encouragement from Dr Barker, I selected English. Not only did I enjoy the work at the time I also appreciated the contrast it provided to the sciences I was studying. I later came to The most satisfying thing about my job is being in a position to meaningfully help improve someone’s quality of life, especially when they are often already marginalised and misunderstood.”

realise this decision was one of the most useful ways to prepare for a career in medicine, and in particular psychiatry.

All fields of medicine involve synthesising complex information from disparate and often conflicting sources into a coherent narrative from which you devise strategies to solve a problem in conjunction with others, most importantly the patient. And although medical school equipped me with skills to assess and analyse clinical information from patients and tests, my ability to comprehend the more oblique arena of people’s underlying motives, agendas and beliefs emanated from my study of literature and rooted in the discussions we had in the Plender Library. The approaches I use for constructing arguments and writing reports stem from what I practiced in the countless essays I wrote and recalling the spidery red inked comments pointing out what I needed to improve. So not only did my English studies help me grasp these matters, it allowed me to develop the skills I use on a daily basis as a psychiatrist. I can also now reflect that the more time I have spent reading about human experience in the broadest sense (fiction, non-fiction, commentaries) the better I am able to resonate and empathise with the often very different, powerful and difficult experiences that my patients have, even if I struggle to understand those experiences myself.

I truly feel I would not be the doctor I am today, nor gain the fulfilment from my work that I do, were it not for these foundational experiences in studying English with Dr Barker, who to this day remains a truly inspirational influence and someone to whom I remain incredibly grateful.

I hope some of you reading this may be pleasantly surprised at the notion that medicine is not purely the territory of hard science alone; it is a broad church and all the better for it.