'Is it safe for Mr Hunter go to the community centre unaccompanied?" Mr Hunter is very nice and extremely depressed. It looks like a simple enough question. About 10 times a day I'm expected to be a soothsayer. I think briefly about patting my pockets and making a lame joke about leaving my crystal ball at home, before I remember my new resolution not to be fatuous at work.

So this is the deal. We are employed, among other things, to assess risk, a job that no one can ever do perfectly - and you lot are obsessed with it, to the detriment of patient care. If we get the answer wrong and something terrible happens, you read about it in the newspaper and we get hauled up for a bit more public hatred. Or alternatively, if we keep everyone in, you think we're all sinister control freaks who like to lock people up for our own rather expensive amusement and self-justification. It is, as you can see, a fine line.

The staff are all looking at me and I feel obliged to give a definite answer. A definite answer will assuage the anxiety on the ward by passing it on to me (in exchange for cash at the end of the month) and make everyone feel like everything is under control. A definite answer will make people think that I am a confident, sensible, efficient and helpful young psychiatrist. A definite answer would also be a lie. It would perpetuate the myth that it is possible to give definite answers about this kind of thing.

Once again, I am at the same crossroads in life: facile self-aggrandisement and maintaining the hegemony in one direction, or an act of honest weakness and shoulder-shrugging that would - should it become a regular pattern - torpedo my career. It's biblical stuff going on here, I'm telling you.

I have a quick look through the notes. Questions about risk have been an ugly blind spot for me, because my last boss so expertly avoided it that I used to feel as if it was all my problem - which at the time, of course, it was. A flashback: Dr Foxton, in his first week as a psychiatrist, asking his consultant if a risky patient hinting at suicide should come to the hospital. "Well, it's difficult, isn't it? It depends on so many factors." I know. I've told you about them. Yes or no would do. "I remember a patient I had once ..." I know. Back in 'Nam, perhaps. Yes or no, please. "Of course, it never used to be like this, you know, before they closed the old sanatoriums. Anybody risky was just kept in." I know. You told me. Hands up. Yes or no. Please. Or I'll shoot.

I shudder and remember where I am. It's OK. I have a new boss. I can see his reassuring handwriting in the notes. What would he do? At this point he ambles in. A boss who is willing to share responsibilities for his patients is one thing, but a psychic is beyond my wildest dreams. Perhaps he can tell me what the patient is thinking.

I ask him if it's OK for Mr Hunter to go to the community centre alone. He smiles warmly and turns to the nurse who asked me. "What do you think, Bill?" It's genius. Why didn't I think of that? And then we all agree that, yes, Mr Hunter can go to the community centre alone.

Did you hear that? We all agree. We all seamlessly pooled our expertise. Picture the scene at the coroner's inquest; picture that weighing light on our consciences if everything goes pear-shaped. It's like those psychology experiments on shameless Nazi prison guards where they all thought it was someone else's responsibility. Only much nicer. Shared responsibility feels so good. Even if it goes horribly wrong, it can't feel too bad.

I drag myself back from my reverie and get up to catch my consultant at the door. "You remember Kirsty Farmer, who went home last weekend?" "Oh yes, nice girl, horribly depressed. Taken an overdose, has she?" he asks. In the warmest, most welcoming tones imaginable. As if taking an overdose would have been a manageable outcome of her going home (on my recommendation); a problem, but nobody's fault, another situation to deal with.

No, I say, wiped out by this response. She has come back to collect her things. She sends her regards. "That's nice, do send her mine." And he's off. Back to heaven, perhaps. Or to the orphanage, to distribute toys to the poor.