A family friend psych nurse working in the state rehab facility in San Antonio once told us that she got so fed up with patients gaming the system that she told a patient who had repeatedly slit her wrists - evidently for the attention and to keep herself institutionalized - that she was doing it all wrong. She said if you slit them left to right you won't actually bleed out and die before you're found. Slit them parallel with the bone and then you'll probably die before the nurses find you. After that the patient quit staging the regular suicide drama and went to other kinds of acting out.
Psych nursing must be an extremely tough job. She was way out of line with her advice to the patient, but the doctors weren't doing a thing to adjust her behavior and the drama was a super pain in the neck to the staff.
Moreover, few professionals known to me actually approach mental illness as a disease of the spirit and attempt to witness the patient. Mostly they treat it like a medical problem.
And no doubt some of it is medical - physiological imbalances and physical impairments. But surely not all.
May God bless you dearest sister in Christ. And thank you for you testimony.
Truly I believe that mental illness is mainly a disease of the spirit, but is almost never treated as such. Indeed, it's so ironic that the word "psychology" is based on the Greek word for soul or spirit; yet nowadays many practitioners in the field, being "hard-nosed scientists," deny that such a thing as psyche even exists....
And yes, the wrist-slitting strategy to get attention and stay institutionalized is something I've seen, too. Sigh. It was one of "Rosa's" favorite strategies; that, and stripping naked and running, screaming, all over the place.... She was one of the most manipulative persons I've ever known, very shrewd, clever, and calculating. And thoroughly pitiable. [She recalls to my mind the character Fischerle in Canetti's Auto-da-Fé....]
Funny thing is, I much preferred the "seriously disturbed" patients on the Chronic ward (some of these cases were truly heart breaking), to the grifters on Rehab....
The hardest part of that job, for me, was the constant, unanswered question: Who are the really crazy people around here — the patients, or the staff? LOLOL!
Anyhoot, FWIW, increasingly I think America has a very serious spiritual disease.... The public square seems a madhouse these days. It was this thought that recalled my summer job of long ago to mind....
May God ever bless you, dearest sister in Christ! Let us pray that our nation may be healed.
May God bless America.