I have a decent amount of patients that label could apply to and I don’t like seeing it used at all. Literally just a few weeks ago I was consoling a patient who was angrily crying because they perceived someone had used it to refer to them. I’m unsure if it was reality based; they do hallucinate and I didn’t personally witness it but its far from impossible and they were absolutely distraught. Using it pejoratively AND censoring it means you knew it was fucked up and did it anyway.

tbh I’ve just accepted that superstitions are part of the human psyche. I don’t believe in “chi” in the sense of some energy that can be measured but there’s definitely some kind of pattern recognition in the human subconscious that’s processing the flow of the environment around them and the people in it that way. And a lot of cultures worldwide have longstanding traditions that guide the way they deal with that both in the sense of soothing that part of the subconscious but also trying to address whatever threat or goal in the environment that that pattern recognition is trying to draw attention to. I really enjoyed “Feng Shui Modern” by Cliff Tan if you want a really great explanation of concrete ways in which principles of that practice tend to help people feel safer in a space. He talks about things like the most common paths people take take through rooms, wanting to have your back against something solid, and not liking having beams and lights hanging directly over your head.

And personally I just try to keep the less concretely beneficial things to fun cultural traditions and other stuff I can connect with people around and avoid things that have been like, objectively disproven by modern science in some way or that would be specifically harmful to some specific circumstance / situation. So like carrying around an evil eye talisman is fine but using an herbal remedy that’s been found to be harmful is not. And I find it’s also helpful to think of it less in terms of specific effects / outcomes such as hexing, and more in terms of good energy / bad energy or good luck / bad luck. So the evil eye ward isn’t protecting me from some specific thing, it’s just a general hope that I’ll avoid toxicity in my life. And there’s a big mindfulness component to these things too; the talisman is also a reminder to yourself to avoid negativity and try to put positivity out into the world around you.

Stalin, iirc. But possibly.

No but you’re a petty lying bastard; we both know that sample wasn’t clotted when I sent it!

Foaming agent. She gets everything nice 'n… lathery.

everything has outliers

I feel like boiling PLUS the Brita would be a pretty solid combo. Boil to kill everything then Brita to remove the remaining inert sediment. I can’t think of any metals or anything that there would be enough of in river water to hurt you after you’ve killed anything that was alive.

I mean I do think suicide should be legal but I also don’t think we should let people just do it without making them stop for a second and be evaluated to see if maybe there’s any better options for them that a mental illness might be preventing them from seeing.

oh yeah should have said it’s a nom not a full, one nurse at our hospital won one for changing the side a patient’s IV was on (in fairness that nurse is generally a sweetheart), but I’ve never seen a psych nurse actually win. Apparently at my last hospital the psych unit got the most actually but I think it was because people would hand them to the euphorically happy manics to keep them busy. I would usually hand them out to say a “special thank you” to their nurse because I figured on the off-chance they weren’t trying to slip the nurse their number or draw her a picture of their penis it would be nice. In retrospect maybe that’s why the committee ignored most of them though.

As a psych nurse who’s worked a unit with door alarms, somebody is going to have an aneurysm if they have to reset that alarm one. more. GOTDAMN MOTHER-FUCKING TIME.

Ours were specifically between the top of the door and the frame to keep people from anchoring a noose there. But that also meant they went off any time somebody finished toweling off out of the shower and threw the towel over, every time somebody grabbed the top of the door frame to stretch, and every time somebody was just mad about something at 2am and wanted all the other patients to suffer too. And you had to walk down to the relevant room and use your key in the little panel next to the door. Every. Single. Time.

So fun fact, there’s actually a academically researched phenomenon called “clinical alarm fatigue” where people get so used to turning alarms off that they stop checking before dismissing them. It’s like when you play a heavily modded game (mine was morrowind) and keep skipping through bogus warnings about missing textures and whatever but while you’re spamming the enter key a real one pops up and the whole thing crashes. It’s part of how radonda vaught killed that lady. Many of the alarms she overrode that day were warnings the nurses routinely had to override to complete daily tasks.

Anyway that’s the story of how the one time somebody did actually try to hang themselves the staff members turned off the alarm, assured the patient it was a false one, and walked away.

Oh hey! I started writing a porn about that.

here you go

You’re doing amazing.

I was gonna say, women have been getting sick of men and turning into bog witches for centuries now, probably longer. The more socially acceptable version was nunneries for a while, since men need to feel like they’re in control of that some way or another. I’m the city apartment version where I’m becoming a night shift vampire /other undead into tarot cards and Gnosticism.

okie-dokie

Oh hey! This is exactly what a DBT values assessment is for! I have my patients do them all the time. Y’all want worksheets? Here’s the page from the bootleg “what to do if you can’t afford therapy” resource I made a while back.

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right now? you’d have to find me first, and I doubt that it’s worth it for you. There’s also other logistics you would have to figure out that also probably wouldn’t be worth it for you.

at my place of work? The environment is so controlled that you just… probably won’t succeed. Most people also don’t even notice the stuff I’m actually doing to maintain my safety. The biggest thing is before the patient is even on the unit making sure there’s nothing in the environment they can hit me with that would really hurt. One advantage I’ll admit I have over the cops is that I’m 99.99% certain that no one in the environment has a gun (the 0.01th time was the night the ER really fucked up*). But there’s also no corded devices, no IV poles or oxygen tanks to hit me with. Even stuff wide / long enough to get some leverage with like a dinner tray is made of styrofoam. Even the shitty coffee is lukewarm instead of boiling (sorry but I do what I gotta do).

Most people also don’t notice that if they’re even anxious I’m usually between them and the door or even if I’m letting them have a sightline to it for their own peace of mind I’m still closer. If they’re actually mad I’m definitely between them and the door and whether or not they can see them I have at least one person for backup right outside the room, possibly 2 or more. I’m really just not that worried about it and I’d rather focus on what I can actually practically do to resolve the problem. Is there some comfort measure I can help with like warmth, cold, food or water? I’m not giving you a steak dinner for cussing me out but I can probably do peanut butter crackers and some water if you’re just hangry. Do you wanna talk about your legal status and what the judge is actually going to look for while deciding whether or not to commit you? Do you just wanna yell at somebody for fifteen minutes? I can do most or all of that with some detail-based caveats.

If none of that works and you’re actually trying to hit me or even yourself (but talking does work like 85-90% of the time) there’s always haldol and if that doesn’t work I’ll try geodon and so on and so forth down a decently long list of options until you’re either better able to control yourself or unconscious. If I have to lock you in a room or strap you to a chair until it hits I can do that too (the paperwork sucks tho). If you’re on something real wild like PCP and can’t be sedated without respiratory collapse you’ll probably have to be detoxed in an ICU probably strapped to a bed and possibly intubated. But the confidence that I have the resources to handle most of the possibilities and that I have people to call if I can’t makes it a lot easier to not overreact to being called slurs and just focus on what the actual safety risks are in the situation and what actually needs to be done to resolve the problem.

On the street? When I’m not in my scrubs I dress like a hobo and it’s very obvious that whether or not I’m actually a tweaker (unless you count caffeine which is technically a stimulant) I’ll probably lose a fight but I also will be taking either a testicle or an eyeball with me and you may or may not get a choice. Again, probably not worth it for you, probably not even worth interacting. Most people don’t interact beyond polite mutual acknowledgement of our existences. My scrubs only barely cover my overwhelming feral raccoon aura.

Here’s real footage of me when admin comes through with our traditional consolatory pizza and cookie offerings:

Me: downvoting comments that technically follow logically but are annoying, pedantic, and lack important context.