Every job has its challenges, and there’s no such thing as an easy dollar. However, some professions are not as widely understood as others, and therefore might not get the respect they deserve in the public eye.
So, in hopes that this doesn’t happen to the people who work in mental health care, we collected a range of stories shared online by professionals who have spent time inside psychiatric institutions and the types of issues they face on a regular basis.
Their experiences offer a grounded, human look at a demanding field, full of high-stress situations and tough decisions.
#1
My Dad works in a Psychiatric hospital with a small waterfall/pond in the lobby. I remember as a little kid watching and feeding the fish (do not remember what kind, they were pretty small). Anyway he had a patient that would literally spend all day just staring at the pond and the fish. Everybody was weirded out at first but then they got used to it. A few weeks later my Dad walks into work and for some reason glances at the pond and realizes all the fish are gone. Apparently the guy had been catching the fish with his hands when nobody was looking and eating them. We’re talking about 40-50 fish, guy was talented.
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#2
When I was admitted to one… there was a girl who wrote to ghosts all day. She would just sit on her bed all day, writing page after page of letters to some ghost she’d gotten to know.
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#3
Not a mental hospital but group home for psychologically disturbed teens. Had one girl come from the hospital heavily medicated due to very violent behaviors; usually had slow movement and response, slack-jawed eyes half shut and spaced out. The other girls picked on her a lot because of it. One of the staff had told her once that she should stand up for herself. She turned slowly to the staff and said “miss, those girls don’t deserve what I can do to them.”.
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#4
I worked security at a 72 hour holding facility for 5150s. One guy that sticks out for just being disgusting, he couldn’t stop scratching his head. To the point in which half of his scalp on the right side was scratched off, down to his neck. And he’s keep scratching away while staring us dead in the eyes.
Scariest moment would be a naked woman that almost bit a chunk of my throats out while strapping her into the restraint chair, but a nurse grabbed her by the hair at the last second and slammed it back into the chair. Thank you again nurse.
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#5
I was admitted to a mental hospital once when I was about 17 because of a bad reaction to an anxiety medication that caused extreme paranoia. In truth, I also probably needed to be there for a while to face some of my anxiety issues.
There was a 250 pound 40 year old asian woman there who was convinced she was Lady Gaga. This was right after Lady Gaga got famous and would never wear pants. The woman in the psych ward would walk around in a bikini, velour zip up jacket, and sunglasses.
Any time it was her turn to talk in group she would start off by saying “First of all, I would like to take a chance to thank all my fans for their support” or some variation thereof. She would give performances during every meal and in the beginning they would culminate in her dancing on the table à la Lady Gaga in the Poker Face video, but the workers started monitoring her more closely after a table gave out under her weight and she sprained her ankle from the fall.
She also would take any requests for music (but it had to be Lady Gaga) and she could play all the songs perfectly. We weren’t supposed to encourage her delusions and they would get mad when we would encourage her to perform, but it was fun! She was actually a really entertaining and interesting person. There was one nurse who I became really close with and she told me that the patient would come back every few months or so with a new delusion of being a different famous person and it was always kind of exciting to see who she would be next.
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#6
I worked at a mental hospital for about 5 years. The scariest patient and incident involved a patient that had just had surgery to remove an object that she swallowed. I’m down the hall when I hear a nurse scream for help. I run to the patients room and she had opened up her stapled shut incision and was holding what looked like part of her intestines in her hands. Blood was everywhere! She didn’t seem to feel anything though and just looked like we were interrupting her. I almost fainted from the sight. I quit that job shortly after.
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#7
I met a 5-6 year old girl who was in an inpatient treatment center for trying to smother her newborn brother. She said she wanted him to die because her parents liked him too much. She would go from being a sweet, overly affectionate child to suddenly despising a person and wishing death on them. The hospital wanted to release her after a few days and the parents refused to take her back that soon. Department of Family Services ended up getting involved..
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#8
My father used to work in the VA, and I got to hear some horror stories. I can’t recall any in particular, but there were several vets with PTSD who would often go straight to “Vietnam mode”, essentially having a Rambo-esque freakout.
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#9
Not a mental hospital employee here – my mum is a psychologist and she has had patients who have stalked her and found her Facebook/email/phone number, etc.
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#10
I worked on psychiatric wards for about 4 years and one of the scariest people I came across was a 17 year old girl.
Madly aggressive towards others and wanted to harm anything and anyone in her way. One day on the ward, a patient overheard her on the phone with her boyfriend. She asked him to bring in her pet black widow spider onto the ward when he next came to visit. She was going to let the spider bite and poison her, her boyfriend and then let it loose on the ward.
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#11
Had an older lady who by all accounts was doing fine. Had our daily sit-down one day, she was in good spirits and was actually due to go home within the next cpl days. Then, something happened. Her daughter came to visit and wanted her to stay a bit longer and apparently this triggered something. Fast forward to the next day and find her sitting on her bed having pulled out most of her hair. She looks possessed, in a somewhat catatonic state. I try to engage her in talk but all she can/will say/ask is “did i hurt you?” Little bit later she craps all over herself. She got transferred somewhere else real quick. The transformation in less than 24 hours was something I still cant wrap my head around.
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#12
I was a patient in a adolescent psych ward.
There was this one person with schizophrenia, and she just went crazy. Throwing chairs and stuff then she got near the nurse station and jumped on that breaking things and yelling really loud. Lasted about 15 to 20 minutes, and there was a lot of damage. Patient got transferred to another psych hospital, and I thought I would never see her again. Then I got out and went to the same one she was in. She was standing in front girls’ beds as they slept, and giving them creepy notes. Don’t know what happened to her.
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#13
There’s some notable stories. 1.) Like the guy who threw a chair into a window, breaking it even though its supposed to be unbreakable. He just stuck his head out the window as we ran over. When we asked him why, he just said “I wanted fresh air.”
2.) Had a woman who thought she was married to Jesus. Then two days later we got a guy in for detox who looked like Jesus. The woman began to stalk him. Not fun.
3.)Had an old lady who immediatly had to be Coded when she came into the unit, because we wouldn’t let her wear her knee high socks for the first 3 days, and she was self conscious of the veins on her legs. For some reason, she immediatly took a liking to me, and whenever there was an issue, all I had to do was smile and say “Cmon” and she’d calm down. She would also always comment about how she loves a young man in uniform, and sing and dance old 40’s and 50’s show tunes for me at random. Thought her head was gonna explode when I told her that not only did I love the Marx Brothers, but *Yankee Doodle Dandy* is one of my favorite movies.
4.) Had a guy who was infamous in my hospital. Apparently two months before I started working there, he was admitted, as a charity case for the hospital, and two days later he had caushed over $90,000 worth of damage. Thats not a type. He would never get violent with people, but would destroy anything he could. TV Boxes, he would rip the card readers out the wall, and eventually pulled down some pipes that belonged to the first system, flooding an entire wing. So they built the pipes in the ceiling, put the card readers recessed into the walls, and made some changes. My fourth or fifth month there, this guy returns, and I’m told immediatly. Within the first hour, he had caused $500 worth of damage. He went to the two cable tv boxes, and removed the plastic cards that have to be in some models of tv boxes (for some reason), and destroyed them. We got him out within the next two hours.
5.) Final story for now. Had this lady arrive in late one night. She was Asian, a parapalegic from the waist down, and babbling the whole time. We didn’t have much info, the family wasn’t responding, and she didn’t speak a word of English. We were told they *think* she’s Laoation. Since she can’t move around on her own, we stick her on 24hr watch, and someone has to sit with her all shift while she babbles at them. She was laughing and smiling, but other than that, we couldn’t tell you anything about what she said. Next day we get a translator on the phone, and the woman talks for a while into it. Our nurse is a phone too connected to the call, and the translator informs her he has no idea what language she’s speaking, and she isn’t from Laos. But her birth certificate says she is. So they are talking it over, and I make the casual observation that maybe she is Hmong (thank you Gran Torino). So two days later they finally track down someone who speaks Hmong ( or whatever their language would be called), and we try again. Once again the woman babbles, the nurse can hear the translator asking questions, responding. Eventually the translator states that, yes she is speaking Hmong, but that she’s just speaking complete gibberish. So we have a parapelegic, insane lady who doesn’t speak english. great.
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#14
There was this women with schizoaffective disorder and had been off her meds for quite some time before she came in so she was off the walls to say the least. She would also only relieve herself on a blanket in her room. She get really agitated with a coworker of mine and took her “toilet blanket” and wrapped it around this guys face. Probably the grossest thing I’ve seen.
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#15
My mothers has been a psychiatric nurse for almost 30 years. She always says the scariest people in this world are usually the sane ones, not the mental patients. However I can think of one or two f****d up things shes told me over the years.
1: Most f****d up: A patient took a dislike to one of the new student nurses. In the middle of the night she managed to sneak into the kitchen, boil the kettle and pour the whole thing over the nurses head.
The poor girl was severely burned and never returned to nursing.
2: They too had a p**p eater, he would eat/drink anything he got his hands on including his excrement, urine, bleach, sheets, towels etc. One time my mother had to pull an intact pillowcase from his a**s.
3: The most ingenious s*****e attempt she told me about was a woman who was on 24 hour s*****e watch. One night, right under a nurses nose, she swallowed her own wig in order to choke herself to death.
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#16
Not a worker, but I’ve been hospitalized three times in less than two months (just got out Monday, and intend to stay out). I heard one story of a lady who insisted she was pregnant, which is a really common delusion (when I left there was a girl who thought she was birthing thousands of babies). This lady started yelling about how her water had broken. Turns out she had peed all over the floor.
There was another guy who constantly thought he was talking to one of the presidents (usually Bush). He’d give himself Purell baths in the cafeteria in front of everyone by rubbing it all over his face and hair and then putting it down his pants.
Honestly, though, most people there are pretty normal, just very sad, which is why I don’t have any really good stories from my time there.
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#17
I work in construction… My company was contracted to paint an old peoples mental home. Locked doors and everything. Top floor was the scariest. This one lady screamed all day long. Every day. This other lady named Rita, would follow us around. Dancing. Yes dancing. as much as an old lady can dance. Was never happier when we finished that job.
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#18
I worked at a school for emotionally disturbed children while attending college. The school housed adolescent girls and boys who had been removed from their (horrific) families. Each dorm had 2 childcare workers per shift and housed up to 12 kids.
At different times, I worked on both girls and boys dorms (I’m female).
The boys were usually straightforward. If they wanted to hurt you, they just hauled off and punched you.
The girls. Oh my god, the girls. On one of the girls’ dorms, it was me and another woman. One of the girls hated this other woman. The girl would crawl into the top of her closet and lie on the shelf, waiting for this woman to come looking for her. She would then jump out of the closet on top of the woman and start hitting her.
We took the kids to laundromats so they could do their laundry. These trips usually went pretty well, but one time a 14 year old girl who was about 5′ even and probably weighed 90 lbs decided she wanted to act out. She started throwing laundry detergent, getting in weaker girls faces and threatening them, etc. My co-worker and I had to restrain her to keep her from hurting the other girls.
Now restraining a child (something we had been trained to do) was never fun, but doing it in public as a special kind of hell. The goal is to take the child to the ground and hold their arms behind their backs until they calm down.
So my co-worker gets this surprisingly strong girl who she has 6″ and 40 lbs on the ground and I’m helping her get the girls arms behind her back. Note: you cannot actually hurt the child, so you have to be careful. Somehow, my co-worker let her arm stray too close to the girl’s mouth and the girl just sunk her teeth in my co-worker’s arm and held on for dear life. Blood was running from the wound.
Now I’m trying to get the girl to stop biting. At this precise moment, two bystanders decide we are hurting this poor girl. They start screaming at us to let her go, they are going to call the police, blah, blah, blah.
As calmly as I could, I explained the situation, pointed out that the girl had my co-workers arm in her mouth, and said if they didn’t back off, the police would be visiting them for interfering with us doing our jobs. Once I mentioned the name of the facility, they backed off. We got the girl under control, I called for help from the facility and we got the girl back to the dorm. My co-worker went to the ER for the bite.
Another time, a substitute childcare worker thought it was a good idea to bring a butcher knife onto the dorm so she could cut a watermelon with it. I did not know she had done this until it was too late. One of the girls decided it was time to act out and she took the knife and was threatening other girls with it. This is where I walked in (I had been checking on another child at the time). I arrived just in time to see the substitute childcare worker tell the girl to give her the knife, holding out her hand in expectation. The girl basically sliced across the palm of the woman’s hand and then ran outside with the knife, where she proceeded to stab the moonwalk (bouncy house) to death.
I called the supervisor and then followed the girl outside to try and monitor her. After she stabbed the moonwalk to death, she broker one of our plastic windows and started smashing her wrist against the jagged edges trying to cut herself. She still had the knife, but I don’t think she really wanted to hurt herself. More staff arrived, we convinced her to drop the knife and we restrained her and put her in the “quiet room”, which was a padded room with a door that had a window in it for observation. When a kid was in the quiet room, they had to be monitored every 15 minutes.
Speaking of quiet rooms. My now husband worked on the boys dorm. One of the kids acted out badly enough (danger to self or others) that my husband had to put him in the quiet room. The kid was small and didn’t fight so it seemed like an easy to my husband. He walked the kid into the room and then started backing out to close the door.
Except the kid had hidden a cup full of pee behind the door and he grabbed the cup of pee and flung it at my husband, catching him full in the face. Fun times.
I actually met my husband at this job. He and I were working a 3-11 shift when the kids in all 6 dorms decided to riot. So 78 kids and about 15 staff. They were breaking windows, fighting each other, and fighting staff. You name it and they were f*****g it up. In the middle of all this, one girl on my dorm claimed to have imbibed her nail polish. I notified the nurse and the girl maintained she drank the nail polish until the nurse told her she had to administer Ipecac. For those of you who don’t know, Ipecac is a syrup that makes you vomit. It tastes pretty bad. The girl admitted she didn’t drink the nail polish and showed us where she poured it out. She just smeared a little on her mouth. Honestly, I thought the nurse was going to make her drink the Ipecac anyway.
The riot started about 10pm and the 11-7 shift (one person per dorm) showed up and 11pm. It took both shifts to get the kids settled down. The 3-11 shift finally got to go home about 1am.
As we were getting ready to leave, I turned to my now husband, a man I’d seen a few times before but did not know well, although he was friends with my roommate.
Me: I’m going home to get drunk. Want to come?
Him: Yes.
We’ve been married for 35 years this May and together for 40.
Our children were reasonably well behaved. We never had to put them in the quiet room even once.
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#19
I’ve just had screamers so far. But two of my colleagues have been punched by patients. No warning signs– one second they’re talking normally, the next second BAM. One coworker had a broken nose. The other got a concussion and was in rehab for a year.
Inpatient psych workers are basically tough as nails.
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#20
My father is a police officer and regularly gets posted in the mental hospital which yields some interesting experiences. This is not so much crazy as it is humorous but this one always gets me. It was just a regular day as he is simply monitoring and being available for hospital staff towards the reception area when a woman in hospital gowns from the end of a long hallway locks eyes and begins to make her way over to the my father. Meanwhile my father is just trying to somehow mentally prepare for the inevitable encounter he is about to have with this patient. Once said women finally arrives where my father was standing she looks at him with disgust and says; “Are you just going to stand there and do nothing?!” Confused, he replies; “Excuse me ma’am?” and with a loud shout the women exclaimed; “I HAVE DYNAMITE UP MY A*S!! AND IT’S GOING TO GO OFF ANY SECOND!! ARE YOU JUST GONNA STAND THERE!?!?!” Rightfully so my father remains there baffled by the encounter and requests one of the staff members attend to the patient.
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#21
Not mental hospital but a caregiving center for seniors, most of whom had mental problems. There was one patient who would mumble numbers to himself but one day he trailed off talking. He then looked up in a dream-like state and pointed to an empty chair not far from where he was. He said “She used to sit there,” and then went right back to mumbling numbers.
Just an average Tuesday.
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#22
Not a mental hospital employee, but a former resident at one. I was sleeping and my door opened. since for safety reasons they check on you during the night depending on what you came in for, I thought nothing of it until I got up an hour later to ask for the bathroom key I saw something move in my room. It was one of the more sociopathic patients and I had to book it out of my room because he lunged at me. After that someone had to guard his door to make sure he stayed in his room.
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#23
Once had a client who didn’t like where the doorway was, so he ripped it out and laid it to the side….
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#24
A patient stopped me in the courtyard we started chatting and he sorta just comments casually on what he did to get in there, and how he did it but he didn’t do it. Looked up his case on the internet and the girl was my age, and we live in near by cities…
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#25
I work for a mental health agency as a residential assistant in group homes. We have a girl who swallows glass, razorblades and batteries for attention, a man who holds in his p**p because he believes that they are his babies and he doesn’t want to abort them, a blind schizophrenic, a bipolar sociopath, a woman who can’t leave her room because her dead relatives come and steal her things when she leaves, and a man who claims to have time traveled and founded Metallica. I haven’t been working there long enough to experience anything outrageous but from what I heard, it’s bound to happen.
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#26
Not me, but a coworker of mine (we work in outpatient mental health) has some stories about when he worked inpatient on a psych ward. The one that always creeped me out the most was about a client with self-injury issues who had shoved a hollowed out pen into her thigh to bleed herself when nobody else was around. Evidently it took awhile to discover as she hid it well with her hospital gown.
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#27
Not a worker, but when I was hospitalized there was a woman who would come into the day room and talk to me for hours about how the doctors were cutting her hair off inch by inch every night, but Jesus would get back at them for it. A few days later she ripped down the glass divider at the nurse’s station and they had to put a wooden board up for a week.
Also the woman who would mumble and make whining noises to herself and stare at you and start screeching louder. Watched her walk out of the dayroom once with a trail of urine dripping from her. About a year later I walked past her on the street with a congregation of homeless people. She wasn’t any better :/.
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#28
My dad worked with adult schizophrenics who were allowed some independence after sticking to their meds for a time. Occasionally, as those with mental illness are wont to do, they would stop their meds because they felt better. This lead to one sitting in his basement with casks of gunpowder, quietly making bombs, while smoking a cigarette. When he was discovered, they had to evacuate several blocks of people and ferret him off to the local high security mental ward.
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#29
Some lady went up to my friend, delicately squeezed her b**b and said “TOOT!” at the same time. Then she started furiously laughing and clapping her hands as she walked away.
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#30
Not me and she’s not a hospital worker, but I had a friend who was in a mental institute for three weeks. She was telling me all her stories when she got out (she was in there for an eating disorder and d**g problems but is fine now) but my favourite was that every morning, a mentally ill boy would get naked and walk up and down the halls. This was a usual occurrence so the staff didn’t really care all that much. However, no one had told my friend, so if you can imagine her surprise when she leaves her room on the first day to see a naked boy walking by.
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