Continuing ‘Who are the other kinds? A handful of examples.’
5. Dangerous patients. Not everybody wants to work with these, I grant you, but it’s necessary and some of us are drawn to that kind of work. Calocane was scary but some of us are trained to handle violent patients. In hospital. Locked up. Not ‘in the community’. Only police can manage them safely there. But in hospital, nurses can do it safely and even, don’t hold your breath but sometimes, we can turn them around.
I said above, well-intentioned doctors and nurses cannot work with the patients who want to get better. So, what’s stopping us? I’ll refer you back to these posts for homework. Three on Assertive Outreach. ‘Social Chaos’ and ‘The state of play you are paying for.’
It’s down to the unbelievable volumes of time, effort, chasing, waiting, form-filling etc (followed by demoralisation) that we have to waste (wards and community) chasing these patients who –
– Actively avoid us, hide from us, skip appointments, refuse their meds, refuse to co-operate/engage whatever the current buzzword is, and (if they actually have an illness) relapse.
– Take drugs. Get into drug debt.
– Are violent and threatening. To us, yes, but also neighbours, family, people walking up and down their street.
– Are used as gophers to commit crimes (and sometimes act as enforcers) by local organised crime. Because they are stupid, addicted, indebted, lazy, greedy, desperate, easily led, have an external locus of control, did I mention stupid?
– Soak up benefits like you wouldn’t believe. There is no hope they will ever get jobs, earn their own living, cease being a drain on the taxpayer. (unless of course – read on to the bottom)
– Get pregnant with miraculous frequency or throw their jizz up local scrubbers and get them pregnant. Both result in more ferals for the future and more lovely yummy benefits.
– Make repeated fake 999 calls but refuse the ambulance when it arrives. This is a deliberate (and rigged) game to make the staff at their paid for accommodation blink first. ASPDs and a subset of BPDs absolutely love playing manipulative games (*) including ‘suicide chicken’ and competitive self-harming e.g. ‘anything you can swallow I can swallow a bigger one’. They get off on tricking and manipulating individuals and if they can, whole services. I swear they must have one hand (or finger!) on their genitals while they’re making the call.
There’s more, of course but you should have the picture by now.
NB Police and ambulance suffer exactly the same problems, and its mostly from exactly the same people. So do teachers, prison and probation officers.
*) Even though it was written in the 60’s, see Eric Berne’s ‘Games People Play’ for a window into this.
Continued in ‘Its a crap job now 4’ Pt 3
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