I don’t know if attacks are more common or we’re just hearing about them more for whatever reason.

I was in psych for 12 years and hardly a day went by, somewhere in our hospital, where shit didn’t hit the fan.

I went to the ER three times for injuries.

We had a nurse that had a patient sneak up behind her and was being choked. She couldn’t yell for help and was saved only because a tech happened to be doing their rounds. Thank God.

We had another nurse get head slammed on the floor. She ended up okay! Some time later, a tech got attacked by the same patient while a Barney Fife security guard stood there with his thumb up his ass. A passing nurse was able to intervene.

A doctor got pushed onto a bed and hit, but was able to yell for help.

We once had to call the actual police. This patient was a well muscled and super aggressive wrestler. His ass got the taser gun.

Hell, I actually had a patient steal a syringe of Geodon out of my hand. I was actually behind the desk when he did it! He literally jumped over the desk! No, our desk was not behind plexiglass. Never had anyone jump over the desk before. He was threatening to stab me with it. Two of our male staff were quick to respond, but I was so scared he was going to really get a good stab into someone.

I’m not even mentioning half of it. But I’ll be damned if those patients didn’t behave when the nursing students were around... you know, so the students could yawn and complain how “boring” psych is. Well, except for the one student who got hit because she got up in patient’s face after we warned her not to.

We had good staff. They knew how to deescalate, how to deflect, when to jump in, when to back off... just a good bunch of people I’d trust to keep things cool or have each other’s back when shit happened. However, at the end of the day, you could only do so much and things would blow up and someone would get hurt.

It got... old.