“Psych Ward Employees, What Did A Patient Do That Left You Speechless?” (46 Answers)

We had a gero psych floor. Crazy old people.

One night while passing through a little old lady popped her head out her doorway and said to me

"I could sure use the company of a good looking young man tonight!"

"sorry I'm not that good looking."

Quick as snot on a doorknob she said "That's ok, I can't see too well"

I didn't join her, but her charisma was on point.

Probably the saddest was a resident I had a Long time ago. This gentleman was a ww 2 vet with alzheimers and dementia, probably once or twice a month he would relive some battle he was in. He would litterally RUN up the hallway and grab you and yell at you to get down behind the sandbags. He would then tell you take take his thomson because it was too heavy for him he would just use his pistol. Then he would get up and run back down the hallway... This guy was OLD and seeing him run fullsprint like that up and down the hallway during one of his episodes was surreal.



I cant imagine having to constantly relive the worst moments of your life where you witnessed and survived the unspeakable horrors of war....

I was a CNA for about 4 years and the saddest ever was my client/resident constantly thought I was her daughter. She went to Harvard and was an extremely brilliant lady in her time. She was non verbal but every time I walked into her room she would exclaim “Elizabeth you came”. I loved this lady so much, she would only eat when I fed her she was extremely combative with everyone but me. I ended up quitting my job there but visited her every single day. To the point that her family kind of accepted me as their family. I finally found out that Elizabeth took her own life at 21 and the fact that she thought I was her gave her extreme joy. I never corrected her and I like to think I gave her peace when she passed holding my hand. She was an amazing lady and I miss her to this day.

Going to go a different route here as all of the stories seem to focus on the shocking and negative/challenging behaviours.

I'm not a nurse but am a support worker.

We currently have a patient who, when he was admitted, was extremely aggressive (not physically) and impatient, he was unable to wait for anything for longer than 2 seconds, barely spoke to anybody unless it was on a needs basis and wouldn't/couldn't do anything for himself.

Fast forward 6 weeks and he has stopped me in my tracks multiple times. The first time he said please when he asked for something, the first time he agreed to make his breakfast himself, the first time he asked how I was when he saw me and probably the most rewarding of all was when he smiled at me and said good morning.

This might not fit perfect, but I love this story.

How about in an inpatient a*******n clinic? The first one that comes to mind was something I witnessed between a patient and another floor tech. We had a man who was in serious detox, d**g if choice was m**h. He was throwing a huge tantrum, not uncommon in DTs, people will do just about anything to get a fix. We weren't a locked facility, so it wasn't like he was stuck there. He genuinely wanted help, that's why he stuck around, and we were there to listen and help him through the shakes, hallucinations, and other symptoms.

He was slamming his fists on the desk at this point, and he had started just yelling "I just want some f*****g ice!" (Slang for crystal m**h) Well, the tech with me was inexperienced, although much older than me, and while I talked to him and tried to calm him down, she went back to our staff kitchen and got him a glass of ice. Like, frozen water. She brought it out to him and put it in his hand like, Problem Solved!, and the guys just froze with confusion, staring at it. The patient and I both realized at the same time she thought he wanted ice and we just started at eachother and started laughing. He was in for a rough couple of days, but I've never seen someone jump from near psychotic episode to giggling so fast.

This was actually in a state hospital that is part of the prison system for mentally ill offenders.



Patient asked for Vaseline. Which is fine. They can have Vaseline, whatever.



But this patient was given a whole tub, so of course he stripped completely naked, covered himself in Vaseline, and ran. It was a secure unit, and he didn’t escape, but we couldn’t get him back into his cell all shift because he was too f*****g slippery.



No more tubs.

Had a catatonic guy who could play the piano like a pro, classic, jazz, ragtime, but otherwise just sat in his chair and stared.

One of our patients escaped the ward and managed to hitchhike all the way to Sydney (about 900km).

When I was in nursing school I had a clinical in the state funded psyc ward downtown. I was assigned to sit with this one girl to “monitor” her behavior. She spent about thirty minutes doing nothing but eating pudding cups with a plastic spoon. She ate like 6 of them in half an hour. Then out of nowhere she very calmly licked her spoon completely clean and pulled her shirt sleeve up before shoving the entire spoon into an incision in her arm near her bicep... then very calmly said, “Ohps.”

The nurses that worked there didn’t believe me. They kept saying I was making it up and that I couldn’t have seen what I saw.

Only later on, like four hours later (it was a 12 hr clinical), the orderly notice the girl had some blood on her shirt. He took her into her room to change her clothes and noticed that an incision on her arm had dehisced and had been bleeding.

Then eventually agreed to send her to the hospital for testing.

The X-ray showed the entire spoon, sucked into the fat of her upper arm, through an incision where they’d removed a birth control implant in the week before...

Apparently the girl had slowly been picking at the sutures and opening it bit by bit until it was deep enough to fit an entire plastic spoon....

The girl admitted that the “ohps” was because it had gotten sucked in and couldn’t be pulled out, not because she’s stuck a spoon in her arm....

Totally bizarre.

Was interviewing a guy in psych ward and he was complaining about how he couldn't have any "white out", a liquid eraser for typewriters becasue he was on s*****e watch. Claimed it was stupid becasue if he wanted to k**l himself, as he pointed out, he could use the drawstring from the blinds to hang himself or he could use his pencil to s**b himself or use a typewriter metal bar to off himself. I agreed it was silly to hold back the small bottle of liquid white out. When I relayed the convo to my instructor about how silly it seemed due to him having several other ways, she replied that he proved to me that he had been considering ways to k**l himself and that's why he was able to come up with so many so quickly. He never did get his white out.

My ex and I saw a marriage counselor who did part of her psychiatry residency at a hospital for people with severe mental conditions. Apparently, the grounds had a lovely, enclosed greenhouse. One day, one of their schizophrenic patients was sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette, as a heron frantically flew around. It had found its way in and not being able to escape it was smashing into the large panes of glass. The man just sat there watching. Finally, my counselor asked him if the bird was bothering him and he kind of sighed and said, "Thank god, I thought I was the only one seeing that.".

Psych ward counselor here. Early in my career I had a teenage girl with s******l ideations and severe depression. The year before, on thanksgiving, her dad pulled a gun from under the dinner table and blew his brains out in front of everyone. I normally form a response pretty quickly, even a "wow," but when she told me I got quiet, leaned back, exhaled, and had to gather my thoughts.

Not a nurse, but I was a patient in a psych ward. The ward was sectioned into two sides based on case severity. I was on the less severe side. One night, an incredibly tall, somewhat muscular man escaped his room on the severe side, got through a door that was supposed to be locked, got into the less severe side, and into my room. I woke up, sat up, and saw him standing in my doorway. He asked in a shakey voice if I was alright. I hesitantly said yes, to which he responded by getting a look of terrified horror and screamed "I knew it! You can see them too! Don't let them get you!" before he was dragged away screaming by security.

When I was a student doing a placement in a max. security unit a serial r*pist was getting meds, made a silly joke, the nurse said "Oh, stop that" his response was "I've heard that before".

I'm an RN in boston in a psych hospital and I've seen some s**t. One of the things I'll never ever forget was we had this manic guy thst had been transfered from another unit cause he kept getting in fights over there and all the other patients were trying to attack him. I was still working nights back then and at about 3am he came up to me and said his tooth hurt and he needed to see a dentist right away. I said I don't have a dentist for him to see but when the doctor comes in the morning we can take a look. Gave him some tylenol and sent him back to bed. About 5 minutes later he came out saying it really hurt and he needed to see a dentist to pull his tooth. Again I told him theres no dentist but maybe I can get some more pain meds. In the middle of me explaining this to him he sticks his hand in his mouth and rips his molar out of his head and handed it to me. Blood starts pouring out of his mouth but he did even to seem to notice. After I clean him up and get the bleeding to stop and call the doctor to get him some ativan he goes "make sure you give me that tooth back when I leave, that's MY tooth don't try and steal it". F*****g wild s**t.

I visited a prison for a warden job and went to see the constant surveillance guys (for their own safety etc). There was a fella there who had used a razor to slice his stomach open and started pulling chunks of himself out for fun, he also started using the hole, which wouldn't heal as a hiding place, a towel was found stuffed in there which his body had started fusing too. Apparently he was quite nice but the whole thing wasnt for me and I didn't go ahead with applying.
Edit: for those posting /r/thathappened I suggest reading this topic and doing research on what seriously ill patients can do to themselves if you think I'd make this up.

I’m a tech at a psych hospital, but I start nursing school in August so I hope this counts!

We had a very tall, heavyset man who swung at a nurse and a fellow tech when they asked him to not stand naked in the door and flash the whole unit, so we put him in a hold and escorted him to the seclusion room.

From there he tried to strangle himself with his underwear (he had them on his head like a bandana) so we opened the door and took those away...then he peed all over the floor, did pushups and every time he came down he would slurp it up. Eventually he got bored of that and began writing on the wall in his pee, and then masturbated onto the door and said it would be “better if [he] could f**k my dead corpse.”

Eventually his IM-B52 kicked in and he contacted for safety/good behaviour so we opened the door again, and he bit me on the hand and drew blood. From there I got permission to not be involved in the code and a peer swapped me out.

I’m assaulted on a weekly basis, and we aren’t even an acute care facility. I’m VERY excited to go PRN in August...$15.38/hr is not worth it.

I watched a guy try to remove " rats " from his [behind]. Stated that his ex-girlfriend summoned them there. He ended up tearing his rectal walls to shreds.

Not a nurse, pharmacist.

Had one of our Clozapine patients miss a monthly meeting to discuss their medication. Called around, found out she was in the ICU having eaten two of her own fingers then visited her mother for coffee, still bleeding.

Had a friend tell me of another patient, made a cut in his thigh and reopened it regularly until the whole thing was a scar tissue cavern, by some miracle avoiding infection. Started using his "meat pocket" to hold pens and coins and anything he could collect in his ward. Nobody knew until a paperclip pierced the side and he finally wound up with an infection that took him to ICU where they found his stash.

Not a nurse but I used to be a security guard in a hospital and we had a patient who self harmed and cut a hole into themselves around their belly button and then stuck a bunch of paper clips and buttons and things like that into it.