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The elderly black woman’s blood pressure had been dangerously elevated. While I was checking her vitals for one of many times that shift, she looked up at me hesitantly. “If I tell you something, will you do it for me?” she asked. “What is it?” I replied. “Go out yonder,” she said, pointing at the [...]

There are cameras in the patient rooms on our psych units. The images they produce are tiny, black and white, and grainy. (That’s not really by design; they’re just very old, and they aren’t broken, so there’s no reason to replace them.) They don’t show much detail — just enough to allow us to keep [...]

While doing a medical history on a psychotic/delusional young man, I asked if he had any problems with his lungs. He replied, in a somewhat mystified tone, “Yeah… I have to keep breathing.”

It’s evening on the psych unit. Several patients are watching the movie Titanic in the common area. Rather, they are trying to watch it, but their view is blocked by a delusional woman who is alternately twirling and dancing gaily in front of the television and then holding animated conversations with it, her face scant [...]

The patient, newly arrived on the unit, is sitting in a chair in the middle of her room. Her hands are clenched in her hair, one on each side of her head. Her eyes are screwed shut, and she is kicking her legs and yelling at the top of her lungs.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!!!!”
I knock, then walk into [...]

All too often I am reminded (again) that the line of distinction between myself and my patients is really much thinner and less well-defined than the plexiglas divider between the nursing station and the rest of the unit. Here is one of those moments of insight, encountered recently during a mental health assessment:
Me: “Do you [...]

“When I was in 3rd grade they said I was a genius but I told them, ‘I can’t be a genius, I can’t fit inside a lamp.’”