*Outdoor* Secondhand Smoke is a Hazard?

[wolf]

Long term care and acute care are very, very different.

You've been in the wrong hospital.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally posted by Lady Sidhe
[BIf that's true, then why was I Dean't List throughout 8 years of college? I took all honors classes, got an honors degree, have two degrees (Psych and CJ), and two minors (English and History). I took and passed Italian, Old English, and the history of the English Language (which involves learning to read and write phonetically, and learn the basics of Indo-European, Latin, Greek, Old High German, Old High French, Old English, and Middle English). I took several special-study classes on subjects such as The History of Ancient Rome, The History of the Middle Ages, violence and aggression, criminal psychology, and profiling, and passed them all with high scores. I graduated with two degrees, and a 3.62 gpa. Sidhe [/b]

Goodness, just think of what you might have accomplished if you hadn't smoked.

aside- How come you haven't done anything with all that education? I see waitress/ driving instructor in your profile.

[Lady Sidhe]

Well, the main reason I haven't done much with my education (aside from working in a mental hospital for three years--whoohoo) is because I live in Louisiana. It's very difficult to get a good job down here, which is sad. You get paid $15 an hour to flag traffic for road construction, but you only get paid $7 an hour to do a job that requires a degree...*sigh*

My family is here, and I really don't want to move. Most jobs I go for, no matter how skilled, tell me I'm overqualified. I mean, whaddaya do? ((YOU SMOKE CIGARETTES!! WHOOHOO!! )) So my hard-won diplomas are just collecting dust until someone doesn't give a hoot that I'm overqualified, I guess....

Sidhe

[Lady Sidhe]

Not sure if the long-term care/acute care comment was for me, but to reply anyway, our hospital did both.

All of our wards were lockdown wards except for an open adult male and open adult female ward, and not many of the adults made it to the open wards...those who did didn't stay there very long because they couldn't handle it and had to be moved back to the lockdown wards.

We did short-term care for children with behavior problems, daycamp-type care for kids with only slight behavior problems, long-term behavior-mod, on lockdown wards for teenagers with both psychiatric problems, some of which were acute, and behavior problems (for lots of our kids, we were the last stop before jail)...for the adults, it was strictly long-term care/acute care. Most of these adults will spend the rest of their lives in the hospital on locked wards, and many of them have been there since they were children, moving up through the wards as they aged. These people are severely schizophrenic, or have severe personality disorders, or are dangers to themselves or other people. 90% of them are noncompliant with medication, meaning that they can't be released because they end up refusing to take their meds and wind up right back in the hospital in a few weeks, or they wind up in jail for assault and battery, vagrancy, or behavior that disrupts the public. All of the adult patients we had were acute. They were actively delusional and very violent, the females more so than the males.

So I've worked both, if that answers your question.

Sidhe

[Whit]

From Lady Sidhe:
I live in Louisiana.

      Gah, I'm sorry. In my childhood I spent a lot of time in Louisiana. I always knew when we were crossing the state line because I could feel a wave of depression coming over me like an inky cloud. It didn't seem so bad last time I was down there, for my grandfathers funeral. Still I could sense it as I crossed the border at ten miles under the speed limit...

[elSicomoro]

Originally posted by Lady Sidhe
Well, the main reason I haven't done much with my education (aside from working in a mental hospital for three years--whoohoo) is because I live in Louisiana. It's very difficult to get a good job down here, which is sad.

I feel your pain, which is why I fled Missouri 7 months after I got my degree.

[tw]

Originally posted by Lady Sidhe
All of the adult patients we had were acute. They were actively delusional and very violent, the females more so than the males.

Is there some known or theoretical reason why females would be more violent than males? I would have expected the reverse.

[wolf]

The reverse (psychotic males are more likely to be violent) is also my experience.

Usually when we get females that are violent toward others they are drunk. Also, the majority of times I've had to put females in restraints (yes, there are exceptions, and I'm thinking of a few right now), it has been because of self-injurious behavior.

[Lady Sidhe]

In the three years I worked at the psych ward, I found that the females were much more violent overall than the males. I think it may have something to do with hormones...who knows? All I know is that the females were much more prone to fight over a perceived slight, they lost all sense of personal hygiene (some had to have doctor's orders to make them bathe) and were much more devious and sneaky. The males tended to be not so violent, unless they were actually actively psychotic. Now, the boys were kinda bad, but generally, if you appealed to their vanity ("dude, he's making you look stupid if you fight him. just ignore him, and he'll be the one who looks stupid.") than the females. You try to get in between two females, and they forget about each other and try to kill you. I don't know...but I've worked at a couple of psych wards, and I've always been warned about females by the employees and doctors, so there must be something to it.

Sidhe

[Lady Sidhe]

I've also found that the females are usually in for violence, such as killing their children in horrible ways....one smothered her child, one put hers in the oven...or attacking people and trying to kill them. The men are in for things like exposing themselves, public menace/vagrancy (due to med noncompliance), acting psychotic in public, things like that. Some were in there for assault or battery, but none for murder, whereas most of the females were in for things like physical violence and murder.

Sidhe

[tw]

Originally posted by Lady Sidhe
Some were in there for assault or battery, but none for murder, whereas most of the females were in for things like physical violence and murder.

Is it possible the 'system' will give your their most violent females but not the most violent males? A function of how the legal system makes decisions that can vary between states?

[Happy Monkey]

Originally posted by tw
Is it possible the 'system' will give your their most violent females but not the most violent males? A function of how the legal system makes decisions that can vary between states?

There are three possibilities:
1) Crazy women are more violent than crazy men.
2) Crazy violent men aren't given the benefit of the doubt as much as women on the insanity defence.
3) Crazy women who aren't violent aren't put in asylums as often as nonviolent crazy men.

And any combination of the above, of course.

[Whit]

      Nah, it's the state. I've dated women from there, they're all insane.

[wolf]

I'm going with crazy people are different down south ...

Or perhaps we are seeing another force at work here.

There are ABSOLUTELY more violent males in the general population than violent females.

The ratios hold for crazy people.

But in many communities, instead of being placed into mental health treatment, mentally ill criminals end up in and stay in jail. Some of you have probably seen the documentaries indicating that there are more crazy people in prisons than in nuthouses. It's a common theme on "The Big House" and "Supermax" shows on Discovery Channel and History Channel.

Given the difference in treatment for the "flower of southern womanhood," it may be more likely for female criminal offenders to be seen as mentally ill or for that to be understood to be the primary problem.

(My hospital operates a very active, nationally recognized Jail Diversion program.)

[Lady Sidhe]

Well, I don't know if it's the state or the courts *grin*, but I really think it's because women are, as a general rule, more volatile than men.

A lot of our kids were little jailbirds, and the only reason they came to us was because we were their last chance. In my experience, the kids we had who suffered from organic brain damage weren't violent. The ones who really had problems weren't violent. It was the gangsta wannabes who gave us the problem. In my opinion, they shouldn't have been taking up space in a psychiatric ward that could have gone to someone who REALLY suffered from psychiatric problems. Plenty of the ADULT females had simply moved up the wards. One girl started out in the children's ward, moved up to the teen ward, and on to the adult ward. Two that I worked with personally on the teen ward ended up on the adult ward, one of them AFTER she'd been discharged and ended up in jail for two months.

I was thoroughly disgusted working there because, as far as the particular teen ward I worked on (there were two--I worked on the DNP...the developmental neuropsychiatric ward, where the kids were SUPPOSED to have both mental illness and mental retartdation). I found that in the three years I worked there, maybe five of the kids actually had organic brain damage, or actual mental illness. The rest of them were little brats whose parents had let them get away with so much for so long that they were terrified of their own kids and had called the cops on them for things like assault, battery, and the like. It soured me on psychology because rather than make these kids take responsibility for their criminal actions, they were giving them a psychiatric excuse for their behavior. What these kids needed was a good switching, applied when necessary.

You know, it's a shame that, nowadays, if your kid runs wild, it's your fault because you didn't discipline them....but if you try to discipline them, you're an abusive parent....*sigh*

Sidhe