This week, in 2000, I became a doctor. I've been wiping society's bum for exactly two years. And if it doesn't get better in the next three months, I'm out of the game.

Nothing is worth this stress. As Einstein said - except he was talking about the H-bomb - if I'd known then what I know now, I'd have been a plumber.

I went into medicine seven years ago thinking I would be a psychiatrist. Maybe I was just unlucky with this job, but I don't even know if I care any more, because every day it gets worse. I feel like I've been stuck in a room with society's biggest emotional problems, and only a couple of textbooks and a prescription pad for support. The system is so underfunded that there's no way I could ever hope to solve any of my patients' problems, and to get them coping better with what they've got, which I suspect is the idea, I would need to be some kind of miracle worker, or at least a psychiatrist. I'm neither, because nobody has taught me to be, and because I'm just not good enough.

I have this consultant, allegedly, but he is a product of the system too. The job has such a huge workload, and such a burn-out rate, that nobody wants to do it, and so the post has been officially empty for years, and filled with temporary locum staff such as my boss, and he has no interest in his underlings, and that means me.

So what do I do? I have no one to talk to about patients. I've never seen anyone else seeing a patient outside of video teaching sessions, and all I know is what books tell me.

So here is the paltry sum of my pathetic knowledge of psychiatry, after six months in the game. Firstly, the drugs. If a patient has been well for a while, you look at studies in the textbooks, check the calendar, try to reduce the dose and hope nothing goes wrong. If they're not getting better, you increase the dose until you get to the top, and then you change them on to another one, according to side-effects. Einstein I am not.

Then we get to the tough stuff. How am I supposed to be? Firstly, I kind of worked out I'm supposed to be a nice person. This may, of course, surprise you. I might look a bit bullish, because when you're away from it all, and, frankly, you're in a whingey mood, you might tend to revel in your own shit. But these people are fundamentally nice, and have been dealt a string of cruel blows, regardless of whether they're environmental or genetic, and it's impossible not to care.

How nice? Well, that's a good question. Because you're not their friend. You cannot be too nice, otherwise they get attached and upset when you go. As I've just discovered. There are some great suggestions in the textbooks. Like getting them to come up with suggestions about what they could do with their problems: because if you make suggestions, they will say no, no, no. But when you lead them into it, with open questions, they own the decision, and they want it. Clever. But it cannot be enough.

The worst thing is: the risks. The suicides. It feels as if it's on my shoulders. I call my boss, and tell him about my risk assessments, about my patients who look like they might really do it this time. When I can get hold of him, he says: "Oh dear." He says nothing. He suggests nothing. He makes me feel more anxious. And I cannot deal with worrying if they'll be alive after the weekend.

It's August. Tomorrow I've got a new job, and a new boss. And I give it three months. Three months: I should have been a plumber.