Psychologists of Reddit, What's your creepiest experience with a patient?

1. Sorry for my terrible English. Really sorry. I don't know if this is understandable since i don't know verbes tenses. TL.;DR.: A psicotic Beautifull Girl had a long weird obssession with me at point to reconigse my sister, just because of our ressemblance, years late after see me for just a few minutes. PS.: the biggest english text i ever wrote in my life. When i had 22yo i work 6 month as a security guard in Brazil (i give up after 6 coworkers been killing in service in less than one month). One of my workstation was in the biggest Emergence Hospital of my city. There's a recorrent psicotic pacient, a Beautifull Girl that had the the same age than me. The first time a saw her was in my first day working there and was in a night shift. She was tied in a chair (clearly unawear she was tied) having a psicotic cryse. The police refuse to help in any way - they bring her and dump the poor girl in the hospital to not have to deal with her in the jail. And this was in 90's so people are really scared because of AIDS epidemic (doctors refuse to see her too - still been a really shit place until this day) and she was in "The Exorcist" full mode. Screaming, drolling, squirming and threating to scratch and bite everyone who get near to her. Past of 2AM and the only profissionals to deal with the situation was a group of Temp kids (mostly doing high scholl profissional course) and the kid who are in charge call the security: me. We are all practically of same age, we are all lost and scary in that situation and we all want someone else take charge of situation. In the moment the girl see me all things OVER. She turn off the crazy mode. She look to me, smile and start to flirt. She was really beautifull in a Moana style. She finally noted she was tied and she was embarassed. I was not a beautifull person so i (and everyone) took this as part of his madness. The only thing who matter for us - a bunch of kids - is that she was calm. The profissionals take care of her, she was sedated and i came back to my desk. The scary part: I work in this place less than one week. Every time i came back people say she came again the previous night and ask for me. "The guy with funny eyes" is how she call me. I have kinda Smeagol eyes. I never work a shift where she was bringed by police one more time. Like 4 months late i came back to the hospital to take a coworker that was injured in a assault and everyone came to talk to me that the girl still asking for me. I'm far away from be flattered. That's weird. The thing became really scare for me when my sister became a nurse and attended the same girl in the same hospital (the poor girl was pregnant and been fowarded to a asylum) and she, through the Smeagol eyes that my sister and i share and a very very close ressemblance, ask my sister if i'm her brother. Out of the blue. My sister said yes and talk a lot about me. A lot! This happening almost two years late. The Beautifull Girl (sadlly not anymore) had saw me for like 30 minutes, 15 if you count just the sane minutes. I've scared for years to bump across the girl every time i go to a health public institution or even in the street. And feel very inconfortable to be part of a obssession of a insane mind. PS.: My sister say that the psicose of Beautifull Girl evolved to episodes of Anasyrma who made his parents kick her out of his house making her homeless. Being a pretty woman don't take to much to her be raped. She was Nynphomaniac in his depressive state who lead all social profissional and polices to label her "just a slut". My sister try to help her but had to give up when she lost completlly his mind and became extremelly violent in the asylum.
   — ExiledBrazilian


2. Nurse here. They say "all patients are psych patients" but the one that will haunt me forever was a psychotic convicted pedophile murderer that we had on the floor for over a month. He was in his thirties, morbidly obese, dirty, missing teeth, had long yellow fingernails…and had delusions that he was a ten year old girl. He always spoke in this sneering child’s voice. Level 9,000 creepy at the start, but then we found out he had murdered his five year old daughter. Jesus fucking Christ. He came in because he stabbed himself in the belly and needed an immediate bowel resection. He eviscerated his wound multiple times during the stay and had repeated surgeries. Somehow he kept finding tools to rip his wound open with. First a plastic fork, then a thermometer probe, then his fingers yanking guts out. He had violent temper tantrums and only responded to distraction and reward, just like a child. If he didn’t throw urine or feces during a shift, he got a can of Pringles. If he didn’t assault staff, he got to watch Hannah Montana. If we didn’t restrain him, lollipops. Each time he was “good” he would smile and squeal and rub his incision. We were all twenty-something women and scared shitless. We had strict orders to enter only in pairs, never speak and never turn our backs. Then one night everything changed when I wore pigtails. I failed to realize that this might be the exact type of thing that a goddamn psychotic pedophile might be infatuated with. He would stare at me, breathe heavily, rub his wound, compliment my hair, call me his best friend. Since he behaved for me, I got assigned this piece of shit every night. I was still absolutely terrified of him but we established rapport. One night he sneered that he was going to “take the stitches out of [his] tummy.” I asked him why, and in his fucking goddamn awful baby voice he said “…*I like to feel myself on the inside*.” He waited until my shift was over to open himself back up again. *words are hard
   — NoNeckSally


3. I got my degree in Psych and worked as a counselor but never went all the way to actual therapist. Working with schizophrenics was hard because some of them hear voices all the time and one of mine actually named her voices and had a hard time distinguishing between the voices and her family members. Was heartbreaking because she was a really sweet old lady. Probably the freakiest experience was watching a video in college of a woman undergoing hypnotherapy. What had happened was she had undergone surgery and during it woke up, but was under the effect of the paralytic so she couldn't move, so the surgeon didn't know she was awake. So she experienced the surgery awake and couldn't move or speak. She repressed the memory but had terrible anxiety and PTSD. The therapist put her under hypnosis and had her recreate her repressed memory of the surgery and she started shouting, "**Stop cutting me!!!**" over and over. It was absolutely horrifying. Most of the class was in tears. This was over 20 years ago so some details might be fuzzy, but that's the gist of it.
   — Chaosmusic






4. Not a psychologist, but former EMT (and we often had to play psychologist, at least in short term). Ran a patient. I was around 25 at the time, maybe 190 lb. This kid was young, 18ish, and maybe 230. Strong by the looks of it. We were taking him from one psych facility to another. Well, I'm in the back of the unit with him and he asks if he can borrow my cell phone to call his mother. Uh, no. Sorry bud. But it was okay, because his mother showed up then. At least, according to the conversation he started having with the empty space next to me. So he starts having a 'conversation' with this woman. Ooookay. Well, he's healthy, so I'm just gonna scoot to the chair behind the stretcher. As we are going down the road, the conversation turns into an argument. (Again, it's only me and him in the box) but he starts yelling and cussing his mother out. Then his girlfriend appears (I guess) cause he starts yelling at another person. He starts gesturing violently towards them (empty bench seat). I tell my partner to hurry up. Now, in the middle of this, the guy starts screaming, then whips out his dick and starts talking about how he is going to fuck both of them. I'm sitting behind him, holding a metal clipboard, and praying he doesn't try to undo the straps on the stretcher. So, to recap, this guy is now SCREAMING at an empty bench seat, beating his meat furiously, and straining against the straps (doesn't try to take them off) We get to the receiving facility, and I now speak up, trying to gently explain that it might be best for him to....compose himself. He seems to snap back to reality, and gets embarrassed. He zips up. Got him situated without any further issues. But yeah....
   — KMApok


5. It actually want that creepy to me, but it would be creepy to people less familiar. I'm a counselor and had to assess/calm down a schizophrenic who was actively psychotic. She was talking about the voices telling her monsters were going to get her in her apartment, but as I talked to her she started saying how the voices are talking about me too.
   — urchigold


6. My friend is an MD. She said that during their psych course they watched a video of some guy (someone in prison iirc) talking about his life events. Horrific abuse, violent committed by him and to him, basically his whole life story and how he ended up in prison was pretty traumatising. My friend said she found herself feeling bored and untouched by his story, and when the lecturer asked the class, a lot of people felt the same way. Turns out the guy had a personality disorder whose symptoms would fall under the pseudo-diagnose of "psychopath" (I say pseudo-diagnose because it's not a single diagnose, it's a cluster of very severe personality disorder symptoms basically. I'm not a mental health professional so I may have oversimplified but ANYWAY), and that's apparently a really common reaction to the way psychopaths talk about that kind of stuff. Mostly because the patient themselves don't really show much emotion about the events, so your brain just kinda reads the situation weirdly. But my friend found it really disturbing.
   — Kakdkdkflgllf






7. The creepiest was probably when I was an intern and this guy was really creeping my supervisor out but I didn't pick up on it. So we meet him together and my supervisor said "watch to see if it feels like he's taking up the whole room." When we walked in I totally felt him imposing on me and I felt very small. I watched how he reacted while discussing discharge and everything had a vague threat in it. Like, "yeah, I will be getting out wednesday" with a flat stare beyond us and a smile. But nothing else happened and I saw the dude on the city bus months later. He was wearing a cartoon knitted cap and had that same smiling stare but didn't recognize me. Anyways, he ends up killing some people and stuffing them into a dumpster.
   — Isolatedwoods19


8. My uncle-in-law's story: He used to run this inpatient unit in Florida. It was mostly just elderly patients, quiet. They had this one patient, huge guy, over 6 feet tall, over 200lbs; he had been a professional wrestler. My uncle said the patient was a very quiet, mild-mannered schizophrenic. One night, my uncle is doing his rounds... It's his night to stay, but it's slow, so he asks the nurse if she's alright by herself, so he can go home. She says yes. That night, the patient killed three patients, broke their spines, and beat the nurse to death. I want to say there were four people total who were badly injured, and four deaths. edit: for clarity
   — noopibean


9. Counselor here. I had a client show up to session drunk...actually more like completely shitfaced. He then acknowledged that he needed to get into rehab. I was trying to help him make phone calls to find a safe place to go for an assessment. Well, I looked over at him and he had dropped trou and was staring at me while he jerked off. When I instructed him to cease and to cover himself he said, "Oh, girl, but you look good today and I'm a man with needs. What do you expect me to do?" Luckily, I had just found a program that would take him. I put him into a cab and away he went. I then referred him to another counselor.
   — penngi






10. Not a psychologist, although I assume the question was directed [toward mental health professionals who practice psychotherapy] (http://crossroadspsych.net/differences.html). I am a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) and my background is in child and adolescent mental health - specifically with young people with severe mental illness, trauma, and experiences of violence (as victims and perpetrators). I have way too many stories of hearing first-hand accounts of pretty much the worst things that humans can do to children. People have mixed feelings of social workers, and while there are some shitty social workers out there, I would argue that most incidents of social workers doing shitty things are more about systemic issues with funding and politics. Regardless, social workers are on the front lines of witnessing the worst depravities of the human condition. Some of those experiences will haunt me for the rest of my life, but are much closer to "horrifying" than "creepy". Creepy clients/patients/consumers/participants are always memorable, because there's rarely something an individual can do that will creep me out at this point in my career. That said, I definitely have some good creepy client stories. One time I was working in an emergency homeless youth shelter in Chicago. That night was during a really bad winter storm, so the city requested shelters take more individuals than they're usually licensed to admit at any one time, so the shelter was packed to the gills with homeless young people. It was late at night and almost all of the young folks were sleeping. They all slept in the same room, a large "multipurpose" room in the basement of a church, on mats with blankets. There was one client who couldn't fall asleep because she was having an active psychotic episode, but she was able to sit on her mat and stay relatively quiet. The shelter was specifically focused on providing safe shelter space for LGBT youth (because many shelters are unsafe for LGBT people), and this particular client was fairly genderfluid, she would sometimes show up to the shelter or programs presenting as male and using a male name, and sometimes show up presenting as female and using a female name. This client and I had a really positive relationship, we had interacted consistently at the shelter and other agency programs. When she presented male she would usually spend time with a group of young folks who practiced martial arts night-after-night. They would practice forms, use homemade punching bags, and spar with each other. This client was tall and strong, she was about 6'3" and used the YMCA gym almost daily (also a good place to take a shower). That night she was presenting female and having a difficult night. I was sitting on a folding chair just inside the room, and she was sitting on her mat about three feet in front of me, with dozens of sleeping young people around us in the dark. She had been babbling with some [word salad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophasia), in the higher-pitched tone she would use when she was presenting female, but she wasn't saying anything specific. As the night went on if she got too loud I would ask her to keep it down and even though she didn't acknowledge me she would lower her voice. The other staff person on shift at that point was not in the room, she was on the other side of the building in the church's laundry room we used to clean sheets, towels, blankets, and clients' clothes. Around 2:30am the client started to get more agitated, moving her head from side to side, slapping the rubber mat, and raising her voice. I leaned forward in my chair and quietly asked her to keep it down so she didn't wake up any of the others. She tensed, looked me straight in the eye, and said in a firm, deep voice: "I am going to shit in your mouth and fuck your face." While this surprised the hell out of me, I was able to keep my face straight and my voice calm and low, and responded with "No, thank you." She didn't say anything else and soon afterward she finally fell asleep. The next morning she clearly didn't remember the conversation, she was surprised when one of the other clients mentioned she had been up late talking.
    — aratinastorm