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W
hen Richard Shepherd was diagnosed with post-
traumatic stress disorder in 2016, the mental health
nurse told him he was really worried. “Most people say
they’re going to commit suicide,” the nurse said, “but
you actually know what to do.”
“You don’t notice it,” Shepherd says, “because you think you’re good
enough to do it without giving in. But, actually, it’s like little fish –
nibble, nibble nibble – such tiny pieces go that you don’t notice the
individual bites. And yet, when you look back, you realise it is having
an effect.”
When you arrive on the scene of a violent crime, he continues, you have
to switch off from the fact that something terrible has happened that
will utterly change the lives of the people involved and those around
them. “The ripples on the pond are huge,” he says. “But I have to shut
that off and look at where are the stab wounds, where are the splashes
of blood – purely scientific, medical things. When you come out of it,
you can say, ‘God, that’s just awful,’ and you do. But at that moment
emotions have just got to go.”
It was a stance that served him well early on, Shepherd says, “because I
could detach from the things other people found harder – going to
medical school, doing the anatomy dissections. It actually gave me a
benefit.”
Facing challenges such as these, the moments that can determine the
future course of your life, is like riding in the Grand National, he
continues, and approaching Becher’s Brook. “It’s big and it’s awful and
you’re hammering towards it and you know you can’t stop. When you
go over it, you look back and go: ‘That wasn’t too bad.’” After qualifying
as a doctor in 1977 and conducting his first postmortem three years
later, it was all too easy to think the psychological load that made these
obstacles so daunting had been left behind. “All the emotions involved
in postmortems are gone because I’ve done the first one.” He shakes his
head. “Wrong.”
When a body is laid out on the mortuary slab, Shepherd says, it is often
difficult to tell whether an individual death will have a wider impact.
Take the example of Stephen Lawrence: “I hate to say this but,
pathologically, it was simple. As with many stab wounds, if it had been
a millimetre one way or the other, he could so easily just have ended up
in hospital for a couple of days. But he didn’t. What made it
complicated was the police investigation – or the lack of it.”
The cases that turn out to be important are the ones where relatives
refuse to take no for an answer, the ones that “show the glitches in
society”. “Society is made up of tectonic plates,” Shepherd says. “Every
now and then they have to move to keep society functioning, to take
the pressures out of it.”
“I’ve been very lucky,” he says, “but there is this sting in the tail, it’s not
been absolutely plain sailing. I am human, after all – cutting up 23,000
dead bodies is not a normal thing to do. How can you do this? You have
to have a fundamental belief that, in the end, you are doing some good.”
His experience of PTSD was important, he says, but it is not the defining
issue of his life. And that upbeat assessment owes nothing to the habits
of avoidance and repression that stretch back almost 60 years. “Having
gone through that, it has cracked open the carapace. It’s out and I’ve
learned, I hope,” he raps his knuckles on the wooden tabletop, “how to
deal with it.”
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