I began my psychiatric nursing career working as a behavioral technician on a unit for criminally insane men. I worked there for two years and was even promoted to lead tech in charge of making the assignments for all the technicians for the shift.

Other shifts and other units were sending staff members to the ER at least every few months related to aggressive incidents. Not us. Only thing was a guy had a stroke near when I was starting and while I think the job did do it to him, I think it happened over the many years before I worked there.

Two months before I left I sustained the worst injury I ever did at that job taking care of criminally insane men …I shut my own finger in a door.

I was rushing too much while grabbing hygiene / shower supplies for a guy one morning. Big heavy solid wood heavy latch and hinge with a long metal strike plate running top to bottom psych ward door. The tip of my finger swelled up twice as big, the nail turned black and eventually popped off. Looked weird as shit for a few months.

Meanwhile one time I was helping separate two guys where one was trying to bite the other guys face off and I kinda blacked out for most of it but I do remember seeing the other guys jaw working trying to gnaw at the guy I was holding. Anyway apparently there was a point where I was under both of them on the floor because like three people came into the restraint room while I was with face-bitey to ask how I was and as the adrenaline wore off it turned out I was a little scuffed up and bruised up…

But holy shit did shutting my finger in that door hurt so damn bad I legit thought I was going to lose the finger and it took over a month to heal!

Where tf was this when I was a kid?

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It was simpler using Linux to just kill things unceremoniously, but my coworkers are also consistently amazed when Epic throws a temper tantrum (rare, but it happens) and I walk over and ctrl-alt-delete and tell it to sit down and shut the fuck up until it’s ready to reboot and act right.

Papermate inkjoy. The other nurses keep trying to steal my last one that I stole from my last workplace just before it started going downhill and stopped buying the nice pens. It was about 6-8 months before they swapped all our managers and supervisors with ones that were literally physically violent. Now that I think about it the pens have actually been a pretty good thermometer of all my past workplaces. If you go to a hospital and all the nurses have the same decently nice pens, that means their employer is probably taking decent care of them (at least as far as healthcare execs go) and well kept nurses are better at taking care of patients.

And often wouldn’t be a drag on society and would grow up and walk and talk and poop on their own and do everything else an able bodied person does if they just had stuff like early surgical interventions and their $0.03 a day medication that’s existed since 1983.

I’m about to get the unihertz atom (I’m trying to cut back on social media use) so I can tell you how that works out.

Honestly my biggest issue is getting randomly banned from trans spaces for expressing my own lived experience with surgery and how I view my own body and gender. They’re so “inclusive” that they start excluding people that don’t use their very specific language or share their beliefs exactly. They keep kicking people out then wondering where all the people went!

The onion strikes again!

I feel like the fact that this topic is being debated between two men is it’s own statement. Although I suppose the people it has to be debated to aren’t likely to listen to a woman anyway.

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Nothing directly for any individual, but you can host, moderate, and / or participate in more apolitical hobby spaces.

One of the biggest ways delusions keep a hold of people is by disconnecting them from supportive / positive social relationships. The deeper down the rabbit hole they go, the more people they argue with, and the less non-delusional friends they have. Try to figure out what those beliefs and social groups replaced, then get them back into supportive social groups around that. Often it’s a hobby like gardening, book clubs, cars, sports, hiking, etc.

That’s why all of this took off so hard during COVID, people got ripped away through all of those things and Russian disinformation bots were right there and ready to replace that sense of connection with a sense of being part of a larger movement. Sometimes it’s spiritual or religious groups which has been difficult because so many of those groups have just become completely overtaken and become vehicles for the delusions, so we also need to work on ways for people to express their religion and spirituality in non-delusional ways, but that’s a whole other discussion.

The short version is: make the delusional stuff subtly less accessible (encourage them to get away from the computer and TV) and try to get them into other positive activities that connect them with other people and help them move their focus away from the delusions without directly confronting them.

When confronted directly delusions tend to integrate the new information into the existing belief system so two examples here would be that maybe the study was flawed or only referring to a specific type of signal or specific type of brain cancer but the more likely option is just deciding that this is more proof that the system as a whole aims to deceive them.

Source: am psych nurse and was trained long ago to never try to talk someone out of a delusion your the exact reason that it tends to just make them stronger.

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