Ask me about working in a psychiatric hospital

[jackflashdrive]

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I'm fascinated by this thread as well:drinking on the job stories/people trying/killing themselves would interest me.

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Strangely, I don't really have any stories of people trying to kill themselves on the unit while I was working. The thing about depression is that depressed people often have very little energy -- not really enough to go through with the act of trying to kill themselves (this is why some anti-depressants have been linked to suicide -- because it gives people the energy to go through with their desires without changing the underlying cognitions).

One patient did manage to kill himself at my facility when I was not working. He took a bedsheet and tied it to the door handle of his room. He ran the sheet over the top of the door and from the other side of the door tied a noose and hung himself.

One patient died in restraints/seclusion (this happened a few months before I started working there). She was restrained at night and when the morning shift showed up they found her dead. The nurse was fired and the patients family sued, because autopsy revealed she had been dead for a few hours and when a patient is in restraints a nurse is supposed to take vital signs every 15 minutes.

I saw a few really scary attempts by people to kill themselves. One woman had half her face missing because she shot herself in the head but was not successful at killing herself.

One woman had jumped from a moving car at 70 miles per hour and had road rash all over her face. Nurses were impressed because she jumped face first and had the discipline not to instinctively raise her hands up for protection (no road rash on hands).