“One patient milked himself for coffee”: incredible stories of people who were in a mental hospital (15 photos)

Reddit users who have spent time in mental hospitals, either as a patient or as a worker, have shared their stories, ranging from the creepy and downright weird to the vulgar, funny and downright wild.





1. “My mother worked in a mental hospital in Ireland when she was about 15 years old. This was in the early 60s. She loved the job even though some of the patients literally tried to kill her. One patient constantly harassed her, every day he told my mother that he would kill her when she finished her shift.

She knew that he loved music, so she told him that she was going dancing that evening and asked him to wait until the next day, to which he agreed. The next day he forgot everything and began to threaten her again, and she repeated her words again. This went on for a couple of years while she worked there.”



2. “I saw a schizophrenic woman burst into the room of a catatonic man. She gave him a blowjob, and it turned out that that was enough to bring him out of his psychosis.”





3. “I remember a girl named Wendy. She was 13, very nice. But she wore the same clothes all the time, and she smelled very strongly. It turns out that this is a typical self-defense mechanism among children who have been repeatedly raped/abused by close relatives. They do not wash themselves or even deliberately disguise themselves in order to become unwanted in the eyes of the rapist. I hugged her tightly every evening in the common area when it was time to go to the wards.”



4. “There was this guy named David, very tall for his age, I think he was only 13. At all the movie nights, he demanded to put on the Friday the 13th films, and everyone was afraid to object to him because of his tough character and constant fantasies of murder. He hated the pills and probably fought with the nurses about it 2 or 3 times a week. It's no joke, it took 5-6 healthy adult men to twist this child. He was terrifying."



5. “About 22 years ago I worked in a psychiatric hospital in a private closed unit. I would say [the weirdest thing I saw there was] someone eating a light bulb.”



6. “One 65-year-old man walked around with a powerful erection literally all day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner - he always had a rock hard boner. It was both strange and disgusting."



7. “I was a social worker in an institution that had a unit for what we called “lifers”—essentially people who had no chance of ever being released because of their condition. So, in my department there were 14 beds, and all of them were occupied. There was one guy there, just huge. He was two meters tall and weighed about 160 kilos. His name was Simon. He suffered from drug-induced schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. He talked to himself all day, but never talked to others. All the other patients in the department were afraid of him.

That day I was the first to go on shift. I got there early to take care of the paperwork that needed to be filled out. As I inserted the key into the door, I heard Simon hitting the door with his fists. I looked through the small window in the door - both Simon and the corridor were covered in blood. I panicked and called security for backup because I thought he had killed someone.

It turns out that Simon was overcome by a severe manic episode, and he literally managed to wipe his legs bloody. And since his other medications thinned the blood, it ended up everywhere.

We checked the camera footage and he was walking and talking all night. The orderly (who was fired that day) slept through his entire shift and did not hear Simon walking back and forth.”



8. “The funniest thing I saw (I spent a total of about three years [in a mental hospital] in my teens and early twenties): a guy in isolation who was really having a blast making the staff's lives a living nightmare until he was there; one day he unfolded a plastic mattress, tore the foam inside into small pieces, put this empty mattress on himself and started yelling: “I AM FUCKING GUMBY!” scattering pieces of styrofoam like confetti. Even most of the staff laughed at it."



9. “Perhaps the most amazing thing is how truly terrible and psychotic patients actually turn out to be cool people when you regularly give them drugs. Well, that is, a hundred percent change. Of course, then they are discharged, they stop taking their medications, and the cycle repeats.”



10. “I’ve been working at [a mental hospital] for about two years now. One patient milked himself into coffee. Did you know that some antipsychotics cause lactation?



11. “The most amazing thing [that I saw]: somehow there was a piano in the psychiatric hospital, one patient who never spoke, sat down to play, and she played every piece by heart, without notes. The entire department of psychos, maniacs and even the staff gathered in this room and sat down. For a good half hour, no one even made a peep.”



12. “The wildest thing was how we were forcibly fed religion; frankly, it seemed almost criminal.”



13. “One of the places where I worked had common courtyards that were used by two departments at the same time. Two technicians from different departments were assigned to watch the courtyard, and we usually sat on a bench where we could see everything and just chatted. So one day a patient from another department came to sit with us and he smelled disgusting.

He had paranoid hallucinations, "tin foil hats" and stuff like that. I tell him: “You know, there is one place where the government cannot keep an eye on you. This is a shower! To my surprise, it worked! He happily went to his unit to take a shower. After 10 minutes, this guy runs out of the room into the courtyard, naked and covered in soap, pursued by two other technicians! I felt a little guilty, so I joined the chase. He ran around the yard several times before we herded him back to his unit and his room.

He jumped on the bed and looked at us. Since this was not my patient, I did not intervene. The patient feinted to the left and then lunged to the right in an attempt to jump onto his neighbor's bed. Two technicians rushed after him and managed to grab hold of his wet hands (did I mention that he was so slippery and wet that he literally slipped out of our hands several times?), and the whole bunch flew onto this second bed together. The patient turned over face down and fell on the bed. And one of the unfortunate technicians slipped on the tiled floor and landed with his nose between his bare buttocks. I will never forget this."



14. “One guy had a “tattoo” on his neck. It turns out that he took an ordinary pen, clenched it tightly in his fist and carved a tattoo on his skin. It looked very gnarled and was still flushed, even though he had done it quite a while ago.”