People with Mental Illnesses

[KimmyCharmeleon]

I did community service in a nursing home once, there were a range of people but they were all nice to me. The rooms they kept the dimentia patients in was right at the back. You always had to knock before you opened because some of them stood behind the door apparently. I had a chat with an old man and his wife, he was talking about old war stories and stuff. Sometimes he would ask the same questions though, which was okay.
And at lunch time I played the piano for all of them, I think they really enjoyed that

Another time I was hanging with my friends at the main shopping centre here, and this old man comes up with this plastic bag he picked up from the ground and goes "It's clear?!", and I go ".....what?"... he asks again "It's clear?!" and I couldn't get it so I said what again, he's like "It's clear?!", and I'm just like "....yeah it's clear...." and he walks off mumbling stuff to himself. Very odd.

 

[KLD1019]

!

Salute to your grandparents! They are really great people

thank you! they are my heroes!

when she was born, the dr actually didnt tell my grandparents anything was wrong with her. back then, women abandoned babies for anything being wrong with them, especially being a mongoloid....what it was callled back then, so drs and nurses would keep it quiet. but my grandmaw knew something was 'wrong' with her. not wrong in a bad way, but different. she was a few months old till the dr finally told my grandmaw the truth after being hounded by her! it didnt matter to her, she just wanted the truth!

 

[dkwrtw]

In Cave Junction where I used to live there was this guy we all called "The Running Man" he would run around town all day every day shadow boxing, I saw him in the super market one time buying a loaf of bread, he smashed the whole loaf into a ball and stuffed it into his back back, through his backpack on the floor and started walking circles around it. I hear he's assaulted and hospitalized a lot of people.l

 

[Springsteen]

I did a work placement in a nursing home once, in 2004. This one old woman called me Colin.

Oh and this other woman wanted to go to Church. Actually there's a story, basically I'm sat there having a coffee with a couple of them and a lorry drove past the home and one said to the other "We never used to get truckers working on a Sunday", at first I let it go, but then she gets up and says she's getting her coat. I followed her out and watched, and then when she gets her coat she heads for the door (which had a top lock which she couldn't reach) and I asked where she was going, she told me church so i had to alert a staff member, as I wasn't qualified to help her back to her seat. That was a weird experience.

 

[mazHur]

thank you! they are my heroes!

when she was born, the dr actually didnt tell my grandparents anything was wrong with her. back then, women abandoned babies for anything being wrong with them, especially being a mongoloid....what it was callled back then, so drs and nurses would keep it quiet. but my grandmaw knew something was 'wrong' with her. not wrong in a bad way, but different. she was a few months old till the dr finally told my grandmaw the truth after being hounded by her! it didnt matter to her, she just wanted the truth!

May God bless her and her great grandparents, who are
certainly real heroes of humanity.

 

[purpledove]

i have no direct experience other than siblings who have in th epast dealt with mild depression and have taken meds on and off over the years to deal wiht it

safe to say though two things ring true

some people need help 24-7, read dkrtws story and secondly, govts need to step up and provide it, read Eds post about the UK govt failing in this regard

The govts have stepped up. Well from the level of County to the State . However, given that seemingly what can't be taken cared of by society thru rehabs/local/private psych centers are referred to gov't level facilities ( county mental health and State) that there is an overwhelming increase in patients. Given too with the economic crisis and shortage of staff.....makes it sort of impossible to help everybody out. There is an over population of mentally ill patients and govt cant cope too, unfortunately

I have plenty of experience of it, some too hard to talk about. The biggest problem is society in general treating all mentally ill people like they are about to stab you at any moment and like criminals. No understanding or sympathy, just shun them.

I agree, There's that negative stigma that's attached to people with mental illness that i dont quite get it either. They are human beings too and needed to be treated with respect and dignity

So do I Peter and the way that some people have no understanding or sympathy is unreal. Not all mentally ill people are violent in any way but get treated like they are. And the system for the Mentally Ill really sucks! They dope you up so that you can't even hold a conversation and expect you to live a fulfilling life.

That depends on which State u may be mentioning. As far as California is concerned, the DOJ( Dept of Justice) who oversees Mental Health facilities and given the many cases filed against mental facilities due to claims of being over medicated etc.....the mental health regime has turned 180 degrees. As to the point if it's working, is still under trial due to the complexity of mental illness and seemingly non-cure presents itself now as a danger to staff and other patients. More violence and work related injuries had been in the rise and hence DOJ is on the lookout for other means to deal with patients

 

[mazHur]

At age 8 I happened to visit a asylum for mentally ill people. It was called 'Lunatic Asylum', perhaps because even insane people were held there. That was the most 'dreadful' experience of my life at that tender age and I still cannot forget the misery and helpnessness of all types of mentally ill people there. The worse scene was seeing dangerous insane or mad men shut in an animal cage and that too in chains....absolutely nude and frightful.
Then there were men who begged for cigarettes, who sang love songs, uttered abuses, drew fantastic sketches on bare ground and some who were totally unaware of themselves or us around just walking up and down muttering something in their mouths!

OMG that was so horrible a scene to watch at that tender age and I still feel the shock of it after many decades...

God forbid, mental illness of any kind is worse than most physical ailments. In the former a person won't die unless he commits suicide, while in the latter he can be predicted to die at some future time!!

Thanks to human efforts in developing medical science and treatments which have tended to prolong human life and bring some peace to the affected. Most people might have died much before their time if advancements in medical and other sciences had not been made...
This goes to prove how Humans are made in the Image of God....as God loves and cares for us he does so too through the medium of human magnanimity and grace regardless of which religion they belong to.

 

[purpledove]

Just wanna share an actual event that happened to a staff at a mental health facility being investigated and linked to the changes made @ mental Health facilities to adopt a lessened medication regimen. This was done as a fight against the claims by many that patients are overly medicated......but which led to an unfortunate event for this State worker. At the State facilities, there are numerous injuries sustained by other patients and staff due to the new regimen

[urlhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWOI8r4OK8w[/url]

 

[mazHur]

The govts have stepped up. Well from the level of County to the State . However, given that seemingly what can't be taken cared of by society thru rehabs/local/private psych centers are referred to gov't level facilities ( county mental health and State) that there is an overwhelming increase in patients. Given too with the economic crisis and shortage of staff.....makes it sort of impossible to help everybody out. There is an over population of mentally ill patients and govt cant cope too, unfortunately



I agree, There's that negative stigma that's attached to people with mental illness that i dont quite get it either. They are human beings too and needed to be treated with respect and dignity



That depends on which State u may be mentioning. As far as California is concerned, the DOJ( Dept of Justice) who oversees Mental Health facilities and given the many cases filed against mental facilities due to claims of being over medicated etc.....the mental health regime has turned 180 degrees. As to the point if it's working, is still under trial due to the complexity of mental illness and seemingly non-cure presents itself now as a danger to staff and other patients. More violence and work related injuries had been in the rise and hence DOJ is on the lookout for other means to deal with patients

People in rich countries are fortunate to have mental and other health facilities...just imagine
how a larger portion of the world's poorer community which populates the earth is made to
feel the brunt of their least tended maladies...
Thanks to charitable people around the world, especially in the US, and other social organizations
who have the heart to tend those helpless people to their utmost abilities...
Were it not good if the money wasted on wars is spent on the alleviation of health, poverty and ideological
across the board through strategic removal of factors responsible for those disease and mental approaches,
congenital troubles being an exception though??

 

[mazHur]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEgul4xDfsI

 

[dkwrtw]

Another lady in the same town I used to liven would walk around town at all hours of the day and night ranting and raving to herself and anyone unfortunate enough to make eye contact wiith her, she was always screaming shit like "You're fired!", lol I know this is bad but sometimes I'd have conversations with her if I ran into her, I'd talk to her in the most Belligerently exaggerated British accent I could and she'd think nothing of it.

 

[hart]

Seems to me we have people answering two different questions. Some seem to equate mental illness with retardation. To me they are separate. I equate being retarded (I know not politically correct term) as being born with less capacity to mature (wait the describes some old boyfriends!), a fixed state of being.

A person who loses some brain function due to stroke, an accident, etc, I think of as brain damaged, not mentally ill

I think of mental illness outside of the above as having a whole range of levels. Mildly depressed to Psychotic.

Most of society might have had or do have some times they have a mental illness. Just as most of society has had or does have a physical illness.

I have both. I am bipolar, with occasional panic attacks and have asthma. If I take my medication and adjust things when circumstances change i'm fine.

My 2 cents.
.

 

[Spirited]

Either way, I don't mind Mentally Handicapped people, just... some of them are a bit "CREEPY"... YA KNOW?

I found this when I started working with Mentally Ill people.. I think it was more of a case of with normal everyday people you can kind of guess their next movements and emotions but with people who are mentally challenged a lot of them can be very unpredictable unless you get to know them well enough to be able to judge their next steps etc.

I remember the first night I started working in the home, I was doing a night shift, I went for an induction and was called a few hours after leaving that to attend a night shift due to other carers calling in sick, I got thrown in the deep end and it scared me shitless in all honesty.

I wasn't prepared for what I saw and what happened and having no experience with people like this didn't make it any easier and that night I told myself I would finish the shift and then call it a day, having people threaten you, being totally unpredictable and everything is a very scary experience.

For example. the first night a man grabbed my arm very roughly and pulled me away from the woman I was working with and he said he was going to hit me unless I gave him the phone, He said the nurses were trying to kill him and he needed to call his wife, I tried to comfort him and everything but at the same time I could tell he could sense I was nervous and he used it against me.

The most scariest time was when I Was a home carer, I went into this lady's house and I had been told I've got to be very polite and smiley because her moods could change dramatically, It all went ok, I got her breakfast and cup of tea, she followed me out the door into the kitchen where I sat and wrote down in the plan what I done that morning, She then like just so suddenly changed, She called me something I wont repeat and told me to get the F*** out her house because she was going to kill me, she them picked up the kettle which had just been freshly boiled and said she was going to throw it at me, Yeah.. I made a quick exit

I did go back to that job and carried on for a while after until I moved and circumstances changed, I would go back to working as a carer because despite all the bad bits of the job it really is such a rewarding thing to do each day and you get to know each person you deal with and get to be able 2 predict their moods and next turns etc. I think a lot of time we get taught when we're younger not to play with people who are mentally ill and it's wrong really, I know growing up there was a boy in our class who had a few problems and he grew up very lonely because parents would pull their kids away from him and I remember not wanting to be in a group with him at school and thinking back it was quite cruel.