Mental Health Workers Share Their Terrifying Encounters With Insanity.

#1 Haunted

"I had a client once who was diagnosed with a pretty severe schizoaffective disorder. She believed her house was haunted and would tell me in vivid detail about a woman with really thin stringy black hair without any eyes. Just empty eye sockets. She said how she always saw her somewhere in the distance, getting closer. One night she stated that she woke up and the woman was staring at her smiling with this really wide smile in the corner of her room. Then she started whispering to her to kill herself over and over. She also claimed that that next morning she woke up and there was a kitchen knife on her night stand that she had no recollection of placing there. That was pretty chilling to hear."

-Redditor BBBBrendan

#2 Primal Urges

My mom worked in mental institutions in her younger years (and actually worked at a large, well-known asylum before it was shut down.)

There was one woman there that thought she was a vampire of sorts. She was only allowed out one hour a day, and they had to use safety precautions. She had already attacked and killed at least one hospital worker before these were enacted.

When my Mom asked about her, it was revealed that she had killed at least two of her children, wounded another as well as her husband because she had some sort of physical condition called Porphyria, which apparently made her crave blood.

By the time that they discovered there was something physically wrong with her, she already had lost her mind from guilt and grief.

#3 The Teacher's Pet

I was a pharmacy technician at a hospital with a psych ward for some time. We would have to go around with a cart and dispense the patients' medications, and being a 5'2" girl, a security guard or male nurse would accompany me, just as a precaution. I never had any real issues other than the occasional death grip onto my arm or manic outbursts, but there was one boy who was entirely different.

His chart said he was nine and he had pale skin, dark hair, and huge bright, green eyes. He always greeted me in the most polite way, asked how I was doing, and always found something different to compliment me on every time. He was extremely well-spoken and mature for his age, so I began looking forward to seeing him, as normal small talk is definitely cherished in that setting. If he saw me outside of his room in the halls, he made sure to say hello and always called me "Miss Jones" or "ma'am."

One day, a couple of our female nurses saw me pause to chat with him in the hallway, and waved me over to ask if I was out of my mind. Apparently, when he was in kindergarten, he grew an intense attachment to his young female teacher.

This escalated to the point of him calling her "Mom" and leaving notes for her about how he wished he were her son. He had a normal home-life with both parents, and the teacher tried to explain to him that she couldn't be his mom because that would hurt his real mother's feelings, and that she already had that job covered.

So, he went home and, killed his own mother in her sleep by cutting her throat, so his teacher could be his mom. The female staff had a general rule of not interacting with him excessively to prevent any kind of attachment from forming.

So, don't judge a book by its cover, I guess.

#4 Eyes of the Beholder

My mom told me this story from her time at a neuropsychiatric ward while she was in grad school. She was making her routine room checks and happened upon the most horrific scene I've ever heard.

This was during the night shift, and generally, all the patients' bedroom doors should be closed. So my mom turned a corner and noticed an open door. She saw a staff member's legs on the floor, halfway out the doorway.

When she looked into the room, she saw the patient, a woman with a severe postpartum psychiatric disorder, who had just gouged both of her own eyes out with her bare hands. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding her eyes in her hands.

The first staff member to witness the scene, who was now lying face down on the floor, had a heart attack when he first witnessed the woman while he was making his rounds.

My mom screamed for help and frantically tried to perform CPR on the staff member. All the while, the woman just sat rather calmly, holding her own eyes.

#5 A Taste for Blood

Not a psychologist but I work in a forensic psychiatric ward. One day a patient out of the blue punched a health care worker in the face. The victim was a 60-year-old African woman. Her nose was pissing blood everywhere and she was out cold in a heap on the floor. We dragged her out of the room and closed the door with the patient in the room. He got down on all fours and began to lick her blood off the floor. Was pretty creepy.

#6 The Poor Children

One teen boy I met had trouble getting along with others. His mother used to strike him with a whip while having intercourse with him on an altar as part of a satanic ritual.

Anther boy was 11 and one of the best-behaved children on his unit. This was amazing given the fact that his parents used all their children as child prostitutes, forced them to have sex with each other, and also forced them to eat feces with their oatmeal breakfast.

A teen girl had overwhelming compulsions to shove things into her vagina and we were forced to keep her on the wrist to waist restraints with "mittens" on her hands to prevent this. She would put staples, pencils, anything really inside herself. She had been raped by all the males in her family, brothers, father, and grandfather.

I don't know the history of the other teen boy, but he would have sex with anyone and anything. He claimed to be sexually attracted to the space shuttle and desired to be a welding machine when he grew up. He was once caught masturbating with a grasshopper in his hand. When asked, he said he was having sex with the grasshopper. He masturbated so frequently that we were required to give him a small cup of Vaseline at night so he wouldn't chafe.

#7 Sweet, Jesus

We had a young lady in our custody with quite a few issues. We'll call her Jane. On Jane's first night at our facility, staff performing a bed check found Jane in a puddle of blood. Turns out, Jane had been slicing the skin around her shin with her finger nails and was pulling her skin up her leg, essentially de-gloving her calf.

Jane also had a ritual she performed every night before bed. While in her room, she would walk to every wall and touch them in a crucifix pattern. After doing this for a few hours, she would sit on her bed and go to sleep. One night, Jane's pace was frantic. Our night staff observed the entire interaction and reported Jane screaming late into the night. When one staff member went to check on Jane, she reported Jane standing in the doorway smiling. The staff asked what was wrong, and Jane replied, "What makes you think you are speaking to Jane?"

That's some pretty creepy stuff.

#8 Gone Fishing

My Dad works in a Psychiatric hospital with a small waterfall/pond in the lobby. I remember as a little kid watching and feeding the fish (do not remember what kind, they were pretty small). Anyway, he had a patient that would literally spend all day just staring at the pond and the fish. Everybody was weirded out at first but then they got used to it. A few weeks later my Dad walks into work and for some reason glances at the pond and realizes all the fish are gone. Apparently, the guy had been catching the fish with his hands when nobody was looking and eating them. We're talking about 40-50 fish, guy was talented.

#9 That's Classified

I work in an ER, and due to my country and state's poor mental health system, we see acute psychotic episodes daily. Over time, you get desensitized to it, but there is still one that turns my stomach.

A guy was found in a burning abandoned building. He wasn't hurt, but was acting so strange the paramedics brought him in. He was homeless, had no ID, did not know his name, and had zero drugs in his system. Looking into his eyes, you could tell he wasn't seeing the same thing I was.

So I'm trying to get his name or anything out of him, and he keeps telling me he was a pilot for the Air Force and flew experimental airplanes because he could withstand the G-force and his blood was naturally thin. The blood tests that measure this actually were fairly higher than normal, but not elevated to the point he was on medication for it. So he was right on that account.

I was at the desk telling a coworker about the stuff this guy was saying when a resident overheard me. He was former Air Force as well and looked like he had seen a ghost. As soon as I mentioned the name of the base, this doctor freaked out. He said that that city/base has no roads in or out and a lot of top secret testing goes down there. He said that you don't know about it unless you've been there. He told me not to talk about it or make a big deal.

This gave me an even weirder vibe...

#10 Impossible Knowledge

Psychiatric NP, here. A colleague asked me to take care of a patient she was assigned. She said the patient was making her "uncomfortable"; she was visibly upset, but wouldn't elaborate. This colleague is an incredibly professional and competent nurse; she was an MD in her home country, and I'd never seen her this way. . . Anyway, I took over the patient's care and upon meeting the patient, he told me things about myself/family that he had zero way of knowing. Things no one would know. The patient did not threaten me, but I was terrified; I excused myself politely and managed to pass on his care to my supervising MD. Fuck no.

#11 Up For Company?

Not me, but my professor had a patient who had Borderline Personality Disorder. Apparently, the patient didn't like the amount of control my professor had over her, so she decided to mix things up. One day my professor got a call from her mother, who was excitedly telling my professor that she had met one of her coworkers. When my professor asked which one, her mother said the name of the patient.

Apparently, the patient had driven several states over, introduced herself to my professor's mother, stating they "worked together," and stayed for tea and cookies before leaving. Apparently, when she saw my professor again, she started the session by saying "Guess what I did over the weekend?" or something to that effect. My professor told her if she ever pulled that shit again she would have to find a new psychologist.

#12 The Visitors

My clients have dementia, and there's one who creeps me out a lot. During the day, she's the sweetest old lady, but at night she sleep-talks.

And it's not normal sleep-talking. Her eyes are open, and sometimes she's sitting up. Sometimes it's impossible to tell when she has gone from sleeping to being awake until she turns to you and asks if you've seen the little girl that was just here, the one she was talking to. She talks about people being there all the time, including a little boy that has died, and she wonders what we should do with the body. She mentions a little girl that sleeps with her, a man that orders her around, and her dead husband who is always looking for her.

I heard her talking once, and she was being very loud, but as I reached the open doorway, she said "Shhh. They're all sleeping. Better not talk about it now." And she promptly stopped talking and just lay there very still.

#13 The Sane One

I had an hour-long conversion with a delusional guy who was confined to a mental health facility, and who was probably smarter than I am. Lots of these folks believe that somebody - often the CIA - is either beaming thoughts into their heads, or has implanted a microchip in their brains for this purpose. This guy was offering a very thoughtful argument as to why such claims should not be so quickly dismissed.

"It's precisely because such delusions are so common that mental patients make the best test subjects," he said. There he was, confined and protected, constantly observed, his health and behavior documented, and there is zero chance that anyone would ever take his concerns seriously. How else would you test and improve such technology? Does the government not have a strong motivation and a plausible ability to create such a device?

"You can see I'm not irrational," the man said. "I'm just straight-up telling you that they are doing this to me. I know just how unbelievable it sounds, and yet, here I am."