Inside the Darkest Corners of Psychiatric Hospitals: Chilling True Stories from Employees and Patients You Won’t Forget
Turns out, Simon was in the throes of an extreme manic episode and had managed to walk the literal soles of his feet off. Other medication he was on thinned his blood and led to him bleeding all over the place.
We checked the camera footage and he had walked and talked all night. The orderly (who was fired that day) had slept through his whole shift and never heard Simon walking back and forth.
I was in one with people who were mostly in for suicidal ideation. One patient was a nice young girl who did not eat anything the entire week I was there. A few months later I was at the grocery store and she was working there but was getting fired by what looked like a horrible bully of a manager. Watching her walk to her car absolutely defeated broke my heart. I hope she is doing better now.
I did my internship (master’s degree in clinical psych) in the psych ward.
The thing that shocked me was nothing the patients did. It was the staff counselors and doctors. Fwiw, the nurses were great.
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.
