35 Psychiatric Hospital Employees And Patients Share The Creepiest And Most Disturbing Things They’ve Witnessed

I was a social worker at an institution that had a hall for what we called “lifers,” it was essentially for people who had no hopes of ever being released due to their conditions.

Anyway, my hall had 14 beds and it was full.
There was this one guy who was huge. He was 6’7 and about 350. His name was Simon. He suffered from drug-induced schizophrenia and had bipolar disorder.
He talked to himself all day, but never talked to others. All the other men in the ward were scared of him.

It was my day to do first shift. I got there early to start on some paperwork I needed to finish. When I got my keys in the door, I heard Simon hit the door with his fists. I looked through the tiny window on the door and he and the hall was covered in blood.
I panicked and called security for backup because I thought he had killed somebody.

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 visited the psych ward as a psychology student (part of a mandatory course) and spent a couple of days there practising interviewing patients. My personal worst memories are the old man who was catatonic and who could have died without anyone noticing for I don't know how long (he looked dead all the time); and the lady who kept picking the worms she hallucinated off her skin. I can’t imagine what it must be living like that, but it's heartbraking to watch.

I knew some of them could / had been violent, I knew the ward was locked for a good reason, but these two haunted me the most.

Mental health matters. Please take it seriously.

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.

The environment was so unprofessional. I couldn't wait to be done.

Not my story. My wife works as a nurse and spent some time in mental health units. A 60yo lady came in because she stopped taking her meds while travelling with her husband. She came out of her room, stood in front of the nurses station and started announcing to every person around her that she was the devil and also Jesus and that they needed to bow down and worship her. She proceeded to remove her hospital gown, wrapped it around her head in some kind of shawl and started bowing and chanting on the floor butt naked. Multiple visitors, including her husband were watching the whole thing. Nurses, including my wife, and her husband were trying to redirect her back to her room or put a blanket around her and she was just fighting everyone off. Her husband was so embarrassed he just stopped trying to redirect her and left.

Another one is a guy who was recently admitted was coming down off something and was constantly pestering the nurses to go out for a cigarette. You can’t smoke in a secure unit. He got sick of the nurses saying no, flew into a rage and in the process bit off his own finger. When the nurses came to help he was yelling at them “look what you made me do, you c*nts should’ve let me out for a smoke”. My wife had to pick his finger up off of the floor.

I work in a hospital that has a psychiatric unit and I am in the float pool so I get sent to that unit occasionally. Few months ago I was there a patient attacked one of the counselors, detached his eye from the socket and he is now blind on that side. 2nd craziest was someone eating their poop straight from the tap

I've worked in one for about 2 years now. The staff are just as crazy.

Here's some highlights

Patient got into the ceiling, couldn't get them down for a while.

Patient milked themself into their coffee. Did you know some anti-psychotics make you lactate?

The entire adolescent unit escaping because maintenence forgot to lock the gate. Don't worry they all came back eventually.

And myself getting a concussion from a patient trying to escape, they weren't successful but at least I didn't work for 6 weeks.

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.

One girl bit her own nipple off and swallowed 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.

I used to work in a psych unit. I have two stories. The first was a gentleman that was diagnosed schizophrenic and was medicated. He decided to go camping without his meds and was found a couple weeks later completely detached from reality. He kept screaming that he was Jesus and that he was dead and he had to wait three days to rise. He refused to stand and walk because he was dead. We had to lift him on to a gurney and put him in four point restraints. A week or so later after being on his medication he was like any other person, completely normal.

The other, I don't know the backstory, they call "Code Armstrong" overhead if they need muscle. I heard the xall and me and five other guys were being coordinated to tackle and restrain this young 100 lb girl. Basically you take her legs, you take her torso, you go for arms, you go for head. We tackle her and she still managed to get her head loose and started just smashing her head on the wall until we could chemically sedate her. She nearly fought off 5 full grown men, I'll never forget that.

Guy had a "tattoo" carved into his neck. Apparently he took a pen in his fist and repeatedly carved it into his skin right on his neck. It looked very scratchy and was still red despite it apparently being pretty old.

You know how really young kids grip a crayon in their fist and grind it against the paper really hard? If you made a fist with your left hand and put it below the left ear, that was exactly how he must have done it.

I saw a man smear his s**t on the window of the room he was in with a dead eyed stare. Never gonna forget that sight.