Psychiatry anecdotes

There are a few stories that are worth sharing.

This patient hears voices but the voices are not violent at all. So the doc try to provoke him by provoking his voices to see how much control the voices have. Doc said, "I'm f**king your mother. She is a prostitute. I'm f**king her." His voices didn't respond to the provocation, only said that the spirits from above will judge on the last day of earth. This was repeated multiple times. This was just not the usual provocation and much more shocking.

Here's another one, this patient first came into the ward very paranoid and doesn't want any students around, but our doc basically said that if she wants to stay, the students are in. At first we didn't know why he did that, but she did eventually talk to us and tell us what's going on with her. The next day, the other male students came and want to talk to her but she refused because she thought they were cops. Once we explained that they weren't, she was more than happy to talk. We got to know her very well and really do wish her well. So on her last day, as her leaving the ward present, we got our doc a cop hat right before we see her. Then we brought her into the office, she just stopped at the door and her jaw just dropped and refused to step into the office. It took her a full 5 seconds to realize that there are no cops, just our doc with a cops hat. Ha Ha. We all had a good laugh.

Being a doc is really what you make of it, fully dependent on relationship with the patient. As our preceptor says it, the best therapy is the physician-patient relationship.