Inside the Darkest Corners of Psychiatric Hospitals: Chilling True Stories from Employees and Patients You Won’t Forget
Talked about their patients’ sexual attractiveness, guessed about sexual attributes, fantasized about them, etc. Mostly about the male patients, but both.
Gossiped about the famous patients and told me who they were and how many times they’d been in.
Denigrated and made fun of the eating disorder patients in particular, behind their backs.
Instead of making an effort to understand, they’d say things like “he’s just a sad sack” “she’s a spoiled brat” or whatever. These things were true sometimes, but I don’t talk about my patients that way. There’s a clinical term for “sad sack”, and there’s a reason I use it.
The environment was so unprofessional. I couldn’t wait to be done.
Was admitted December 3 years ago.
Before that I had a sibling who was in and out of the care system for years prior.
She had ward mates, one of them was convinced he was the terminator, talked like him, dressed like him, carried round a banana for a shotgun.
Another lady was dancing around the room, sticking to the walls, then taking her clothes off, she tried touching several of the males on ward, before it was discovered her husband had just died a few days prior.
There was an old fella with super bad anxiety, but he was really nice, and at the hospital I was at they had an ECT (Electroconvulsive Therapy) ward. After his first session, he was unquestionable changed by the experience, no longer nice, but not horrible, he said he “just felt empty.”
Strangest thing that happened to me, was probably making a person up, I was friends with a person called Chris, who apparently didn’t exist. I’m not psychotic, which made it all the more odd. I think it was a coping mechanism.
Mostly though, what stuck with me, I met so many creative people, painters, poets, musicians, sculpters, dancers. People who I may never come across again, but we shared a few weeks of life together.
Worked security for an emergency behavioral health.
I saw many, many crazy things. Many sad things, many confusing things.
The one I shall share today is the woman who started throwing rocks at the window of the staff area.
Why do you let the patients have rocks, you ask?
We don’t. She smuggled them in. Inside herself. A substantial number of rocks, approximately golf ball sized.
Not me, but a friend of mine that struggled earlier in life. He made a birdhouse for his mother and wanted to paint it red as it was her favorite color. But he never got to because one of the other patients would always drink the red paint before anyone could use it.
I was supervising a patient overnight on a snowy December night. This guy *loved* Christmas. I mean, *loved* it. In the early morning hours, we got some calls from other units saying they were missing their Christmas trees. We wondered why they thought we knew where they went, until we saw trails in the snow of ornaments and artificial pine needles leading to his bedroom window. Upon opening his door, we discovered a forest of Christmas trees packed into his room, at least 6 or 7, with him giddily sitting in the middle of them. At some point he snuck out through his window and stole Christmas from everyone. How nobody including us heard him is still a mystery to me. Another time, we had a group of three patients all strip completely naked, elope from the complex, and run two miles away to the local Police Department. The leader of the group did this more than once, and the police officers all knew her name and if they saw her, they simply met her out front and took her back.
