Great moments in emergency psychiatry

A few of the more choice things we've heard from the ER psych contingent tonight...

Overheard:
Patient: You're a bitch. I don't want to be here.
RN: Well, sir, you should've thought about that before you started walking around naked in your yard.

A seven year old's mother told one of my colleagues the following:

Mom: I said to my son, that's it! You're too disrespectful! I'm sending you to boarding school. And he says, well, if you do that, I'll kill myself. And so I says, well, I'm going to do it, are you going to kill yourself? And he says, if you do it, I'll kill myself. We went like that for about an hour, and then he had a violent outburst.
Colleague: Which means, what, "a violent outburst"?
Mom: Well, when I tried to slap him in the face, 'cause he was being disrespectful, he grabbed my hands and pushed me back. Like he always does.
Colleague: Okay. Have you considered how this might change if you didn't slap him?
Mom: What? But I needed to slap him, he was being disrespectful!

I had a patient tell me tonight, when I asked if he'd ever had a head injury, "Well, I got hit in the head with some pretty severe rocks as a kid."

A different patient told me, "I done some real illiterate things in my life, but I've never tried to kill myself."

I later got consulted for a patient whom the ER told me had said he wanted to kill himself. Yesterday he had a pretty bad fall and broke several ribs. What he said was, "if this don't stop hurting, I'd rather be dead." I give you a direct excerpt from the consult note I wrote:

When questioned about his statement, the patient vehemently denies suicidal ideation. He says, "I don't want to kill myself. I have too much to live for. I should've been dead several times - I had this accident, and a couple of months ago I got bitten by a poisonous snake." When asked how he felt that he had come "close to death" more than once in the past several months, he replied, "I feel fortunate to be alive. I pray every day and thank God that he let me make it another day, but then, we all have our moments of weakness with our words, don't we?" He states that he definitely feels that he can keep himself safe.

Oh, yeah. Let's make sure the psychiatrists see that one....because the mere mortal ER docs couldn't possibly asses that guy's safety. I mean, come on, if he's going to be all vague and dodgy about it...!!

And the night's barely half over....I'm guessing there's more to come before daylight....