Once upon a time, in (what seems) a galaxy far, far away, I graduated from my undergraduate psychology course.
My aim was (and still is) to go into the clinical side of things. And to my credit I have been doing voluntary work with a mental health charity for the past nine months, so am at least getting some form of experience with 'service users' (or humans as they're occasionally also known).
However, as much as I'd like to get paid for the talking therapy side of things, it also means dealing with my Achilles' heel.
My sense of humour.
Whenever I'm in circumstances where laughter would be considered inappropriate, I find myself having to stifle a chuckle, giggle, smirk, guffaw, LOL or full-on ROTFLMAO. Add to this an eye for noting the incongruous, and my generally ironic disposition, and it means wearing a girdle during tense situations to ensure my sides don't split.
It's not that I'm an unsympathetic sicko (well, not all the time), and it may well just be my body's (and mind's) way of dealing with tension. It's sort of like being at a wake when there's a sense of relief when someone is brave enough to crack the first joke. I'm craving for that kind of relief.
So obviously in one-on-one situations where someone is relaying a long litany of difficult events and it's important to maintain a serious and sensitive disposition, my insides feel like a bottle of Coke that's been held by someone with Parkinson's for fifty minutes (there's that dodgy sense of humour again).
Occasionally I get face-to-face time with determined patients or their relatives in my admin job at a psychiatric hospital. Usually these are of the 'won't take no for an answer' kind who'd like to ramble for a while until they forget exactly what it was that made them so irate in the first place.
Yesterday I had to deal with a relative who had been upset by her perceived treatment during a ward round for her brother.
One of my colleagues had attempted to deal with her, but she clearly wasn't going to take no for an answer.
In our office there's an unofficial motto that if you can't fob someone off then you pass them on, and after speaking to her for a minute I realized this was going to be a notebook case (listening is one thing, but writing someone's complaints down makes it look like things are really being taken seriously).
We went out to the garden area, and it soon became evident that this was going to be an encounter with salient emotions in the foreground.
In addition, the woman was quite attractive and there was a heavy layer of cleavage protruding from her blouse.
This was clearly going to be my ultimate test.
It quickly became apparent that she had a lot to get off her chest (which I was more than willing to help with).
So for around fifteen minutes I had to listen to her recent history within the mental health system, her brother's, "heterophobia", something about a letter from Reggie Kray which proved her brother was straight, something about a letter from the Pope (possibly to prove her brother was a Catholic) and being a close friend with someone in the House of Lords.
In addition, we were talking in the garden, where a couple of inpatients were attempting to distract me by having what seemed to be a leering contest from around a few feet from where I was maintaining my serious and sensitive disposition.
The woman was very personable, and it wasn't difficult to discern amongst the more fantastical elements of her story a genuine sense of being disregarded and dismissed in respect to her and her brother's treatment (the two being intrinsically linked).
But if there's one side of things I have to a tee it's 'the usher'. It's the part where a meeting is brought to a close, goodbyes are given and the individual is politely ushered out of the building.
On the way out she told me I was "a gentleman" and that "the mental health system needs people like you higher up in it".
So how could I in any way possibly doubt the woman's sanity?