In Reply to: Re: insanity is scarey stuff posted by susie on March 09, 2004 at 02:57:44:
Working midnight-to-noon on weekends...we were a skeleton crew and a superstitious lot. Full moon tonight? Yee-hah! Even though we knew there was no statistical support for the belief that full moons bring out the worst cases, still, we worried and said our prayers. We knew how to do our jobs professionally, but when you're sleep deprived and dealing with someone with someone with a crack-induced psychosis at 4 a.m., your perception of things can get bizaare.
Or waiting for that 1 a.m. call every Saturday from the person with borderline personality disorder who was drunk, screaming every obscenity he could think into the phone while simultaneously threatening to do something violent of vile...yeah, we would do a little ritual dance in the cynical hope the call wouldn't come. And laugh at our wary, weary effort to exert magical control over something that was essentially uncontrollable.
Finally, what I was thinking about that scared the spooked me wasn't schizophrenia or bipolar or even borderline, but the rare cases where the person appeared to have multiple personalities. First of all, this is a highly debatable and controversial diagnosis. Second, there isn't a magic bullent, i.e., an efficacious medication, that will address the condition. Watching someone rapidly change--almost physically morph--right before your eyes--is very disconcerting. If, on top of that, the person has a "personality" that presents with a voice from The Exorcist, well, yeah, the hair on my neck would stand up.
What I didn't talk about--and perhaps should have--is how we would debrief from these sorts of encounters. The team would always take time to process what had happened, how well or poorly we had responded, and what we might do differently in the future. So while I'm talking about how the Exoricist personality spooked me, one of the more cynical nurses says she thought it was a lousy acting job and simple bid for attention. Just to keep things in perspective, we had a psychiatrist from the Phillipines who went to mass every morning, because, quite frankly, she thought the work we did had a dimension that required a certain level of spiritual "armor."
I didn't mean to suggest that people with mental illnesses are demon possessed. What I was trying to suggest is that mental illness is scarey enough in and of itself.