our patient:
- doesn’t take his medication, we inform him about the risks and document. He says he’ll take them ‘later’, never does.
- refuses his insulin, we inform him about the risks and document as well as chart.
- refuses his blood thinners, we inform him about the risks and document.
- turns his phone obnoxiously loud, also talks loud.
- insults us several times every day, gets passive-aggressive.
this is not psychiatry, patient is a young, AOX4, fully competent adult.
Fine, you’re a free man and free to do with your life what you want. But why go to a hospital in the first place if you are going to behave like this?
Yesterday we found him unconscious on the floor, vitals were normal, didn’t hit his head. He is being released tomorrow. Doctor agrees.
I have the feeling we’re going to see him again very soon, but he is the biggest asshole I’ve met in my nursing career.
Why do people behave like this? we are literally trying to give him some quality of life and he attacks us each time we open the door. why?
If any of you is a nurse and has some insight, I’m all ears.
Do please notice that I’m not asking how to deal with people like this: we document, chart and move on, but to understand why in the fuck people are like this.
I’d argue, based on your post, that this is absolutely about his psychiatric state. People act like this because their mental, emotional and behavioral health is poor.
Being a functional adult does not mean you have good mental health.
100% this. Patient likely knows he’s the cause of most of his problems. But it’s so much easier to to not acknowledge that. Therefore his problems must be caused by someone else, likely the medical professionals, because they can’t just give him a pill to fix everything.
You see the same behavior in police videos of criminals blaming the cops for arresting them or judges for sentencing them.
I’m concerned about this statement. With the advent of body cam footage we’ve been allowed to see from arrests, often turns out the LEO was untruthful, rather than the arrestee. Further, oir societies create conditions of abject despair, then criminalize abject despair. It’s disheartening to read this especially from anyone in any medical professional community.
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If he’d given up, he’d be apathetic rather than argumentative.
He sounds like a teenager acting out, who wants someone to set boundaries and make him do the right thing, except he’s an adult so they can’t.