Therapists Share Their Most Disturbing Case - AskReddit

she fed her dad's corpse for six months after he died shoved food in his mouth dressed him and bathed him therapists has a patient ever shared something that was either too much or caused you to question your own life I worked with underprivileged patients at an outpatient center in a very poor neighborhood all of my patients had to be diagnosed with a chronic mental illness in order to qualify for services one patient I worked with lived in an abusive home she refused to leave due to cognitive impairments and there wasn't anything we could do to make her leave she dealt with many health issues over the few years I worked with her and eventually was diagnosed with a terminal disease she passed away three months later but before she passed she said to me some people never get a happy ending I guess this really stuck with me because you always hear that it gets better or it will all be okay in the end but for some people it just doesn't difficult to answer this question without getting disrespectfully specific but I will say I struggle the most with clients whose coping mechanisms have been stuck on blame others for decades I understand fully how it happens and I have empathy for it and we can work it out together but sometimes that pattern gets so extreme that clients hurt others that's when I have the most difficulty as a therapist figuring out what's reportable very very little and how to keep helping someone whose value system has gotten so out of whack that they're willing to hurt other people and are so ferociously stuck on defense that they will not engage in moral injury or trauma work with me clients suicidal thoughts self-harm graphic sexual abuse wild OCD thoughts like paranoia none of that fazes me anymore if you're motivated by being worried about being too much don't be that's what we're here for the human brain is whack as hell sometimes we all need support as for questioning my own life absolutely therapy is a real two-way street things my clients say caused me to reflect on myself and my choices all the time usually in very lovely interesting ways I wish I could tell you some of the brilliant thought-provoking things I have heard in sessions it's such a privilege to do this work therapist here I do a lot of mental health assessments slash evaluations rather than long-term therapy I can't get too specific but I used to contract for CPS in my state to do evaluations with kids and later moved to a different work setting well one day a year or two later a woman came in for an evaluation and told me a pretty normal trying to get my life back in order story but one thing stuck out that she had caused the death of her child as we're talking I realized that I knew who that kid was because of my previous job and had worked with them a few times I'm glad I didn't make the connection until late in the evaluation because it definitely threw a wrench me emotionally I ended up referring the woman out to a different provider afterwards I got out of the therapy game a decade ago but I used to work with abused and neglected children in their families I had a father of a sexually abused little girl that was contemplating doing something serious to the offender I talked him down and let him come to his own realizations about the consequences of those actions however it made me think what would I do in his situation could I control myself also hearing how many of the moms live in boyfriends would abuse the children was pushing me towards taking one of them out behind the shed hearing those kids stories was beginning to affect me after I had my own kids just too much so I changed careers still helping people just in a different way I studied to become a clinical psychologist but switched to a different specialization after a student internship I did so I guess this counts I can't disclose the specific details for ethical reasons but in general it was never the abused or the traumatized that bothered me I am genuinely empathetic to those sorts of people in their situations are beyond heartbreaking but I was able enough to handle them the patients that were too much for me were those who were so detached from reality that there was little reasoning to do with them each of those sessions were extremely stressful and mentally taxing I only ever got to participate in about two dozen of them but that was enough to know I definitely didn't have the fortitude to deal with those sorts of people as a career I had an adolescent client whose friend had just been murdered while the client was in residential treatment the client was neither sad nor mad just calmly told me he knew who did it and was going to kill them as soon as he got out what made me question was the fact that I could completely understand his decision this kid wasn't a bad kid just a deeply hurt kid who was abandoned by everyone he'd ever loved his decision was a logical reaction and it made me question morality in a huge way I thoroughly enjoyed working with this client and he changed the way I view seemingly immoral actions I've just transitioned to working with older clients the number of men are meet who just give up because there's nothing left in their lives after their spouses died or who become unwell and feel like they're a burden or who just don't see the point of living once they can work anymore as ridiculous it's what pushed me to try and get involved with men's rights despite how much of a minefield it is we have to stop treating men the way we do because the long-term effects of being treated like an economic vending machine and a socio-cultural punching bag is appalling these men have a deep-seated belief that if they aren't sacrificing themselves for everyone around them they literally don't deserve to be alive it's some real grim stuff therapists here I worked in a County Jail for several years I mostly did assessments in booking so I saw people freshly arrested some were high on drugs some unmedicated mentally ill gangbangers you name it I've seen it one case was a woman in her 40s who was trafficked from Asia and her teens for sex addicted to meth with a man would be her constantly she was arrested for domestic violence had visible bruises on her person i sat with her for a while as she recounted the years of abuse by this man she cried I offered her support validation resources in the community and told her I would check in with her the following day she reached for my hand and said thank you through her tears after I sat with her I went to my office and cried a guttural roar I indicating that something had stirred within me I was in a physically abusive relationship years earlier that I thought I had processed and overcome and I worked with many women who were victims of DV over the years but something about her story in the way she said thank you she had not shared much of her experience with anyone stayed with me I was still not done dealing with my own trauma from being in an abusive relationship I went back to therapy shortly after seeing this woman I hope she's out there doing well and safe so hard to answer this without specifics I am a therapist but was helping my former job with a therapeutic mentor spot because a person left I did four hours a week with this adolescent girl who was adopted but had a lot of mental health issues and past trauma parents were crap parents who let her down a lot with false promises substance abuse and suspected sexual abuse we had many great talks did activities together and had a good time I ended up getting a call she was admitted for attempting suicide and they asked me to come sit with her until her adoptive parents arrived I did and it was fine she smiled quite a bit and we did some games and distractions to help her cope I offered to come spend time with her inpatient a week later and it was like she was a completely different person she had scratched her arms neck and face so bad trying to hurt herself she had marks everywhere ripped out clumps of hair stared at me very intently with a sinister grin on her face it was not the girl I had mentored for six months but rather an over medicated shell of a human she ended up being rejected by her adoptive family and sent off to a group home never saw her again can't go into specifics because of privacy laws but while training I was given cases that definitely made me grateful my master's program requires all of us to have a therapist of our own this wasn't a story I hadn't heard before just the amount of patience I have who have either committed the same heinous acts or who have had the same heinous acts committed upon them gets me down after a while that's also when I know I need to catch that unhealthy burnout before it happens because that's also dangerous I worked with severe and persistent mental health clans I had a girl we called stab you in the head girl no why she stabbed her mom in the head and killed her I also had a client that lived with her dead dad's corpse for six months after he died she fed him shoved food in his mouth dressed him in different clothes trimmed his nails and bathed him the mailman finally called the police and she spent two years in the State Hospital when I got her case I asked her why she did it and she said she just didn't know what to do I had a client whose father was her grandfather and was the father of one of her children and her mother was also her half-sister there was very little done it was absolutely sickening instead the system here blamed my client and kept locking her away in facilities rather than teaching her how to process and cope with her trauma and pain my client was one heck of a survivor but was troubled and difficult you had to be someone really special to garner her trust and I felt privileged to have done so I also had a group of siblings one of whom was severely disabled physically and mentally who were prostituted out by their own parents she was around five when I first encountered her awful things were done to all of the siblings but she was the youngest smallest and apparently attracted an especially sick clientele she had gone to dark places no one should ever have to face in order to survive and it marked her in equally dark ways I am positive the youngest will be diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder and do very very bad things when she's older there was one case that broke that mold I wasn't the primary therapist on the case but at times helped out my coworker who to her credit had saint-like patience with this family the kid was very sweet but the parents were two of the nastiest people I've ever met they had divorced and we're using custody as a cudgel to try to punish each other to the point where both had made false abuse claims against their former spouse the poor kid was essentially growing up in the middle of an emotional warzone and his parents knew that but neither was willing to try to even shield their child from their behavior the outright made the decision that they would do permanent psychological harm to their child than lose the divorce process which at that point had been going on for years I'm glad I wasn't in the lead on that one because it's one of the few cases where I feel I wouldn't have been able to maintain my common session this is pretty early on in my career when I was working with a clinic I had a patient who was a bit younger around 19 to 20 I won't go into details about her situation but she would occasionally experience symptoms of depression and anxiety we had a great rapport going and she always seemed happy to see me and would joke around with me we probably worked together for about a few months and everything was going quite well she was able to manage her moods and could deal with anxiety better and was functioning quite well one day she said that she needed to take a couple months off for a move she scheduled her follow-up appointment and I knew she had our emergency number and whatnot so I wasn't too worried when she missed our follow-up appointment I was a bit curious it wasn't the first time and sent her an email to check in her parents responded that she had passed away and while they didn't go into great detail it sounded like she was a victim of suicide it would be my first real experience of anything like that and I was absolutely devastated she was on my mind for a long time I went over my notes I would retrace every conversation trying to figure out if I had missed something I was also in counseling during this time it was a part of our work for new therapists and my counselor helped me a lot with integration but I very much questioned if I was cut out for the work during that period of time therapists here I can't say that anyone has ever over shared with me in a way that had me questioning my career choice if anything it's annoying when my clients don't share enough relevant information I feel like they have wasted their time and money on our sessions and I feel bad I think every therapist has a niche clientele that they enjoy and feeds their life joy as well as vice versa I will never work with kids because 95% of the time it's the parents I also find that couples who have been married forever are also exhausting to me so I try to avoid them as much as I can however I love working with people who were in the middle of life transitions as well as people experiencing spiritual issues anxiety disorders are also super easy to treat quickly I have had a few situations that have been unsettling or disturbing one was a parent-child combo where the parent would actively sabotage the child's effort to grow up and mature I remain convinced that the parent had to be the very definition of evil there was either sociopathy or psychopathy at play there another one was when a sex offender had begun to profile me as a victim while in session I quickly ended the session spoke to my boss about it and never saw him again I began Krav Maga lessons afterwards to ensure I never felt so helpless again all of this being said I love my job and I can't imagine doing anything else that would bring me as much fulfillment so to get a master's in mental health counseling I had to do a stint as a free intern doing therapy for people without insurance on my first day my first client told me she had nothing to live for no will to live and everyone in her family had already committed suicide so she wanted to as well i sat there like what the hell where do I even start so I called in my supervisor and he showed me how to assess if a client is a danger to themselves or others for the rest of my time working with her suicide was all she would talk about the clinic director finally told me that she was no longer allowed to have therapy unless she agreed to move on past her obsession with suicide because it was very unhealthy and she wasn't getting anywhere by talking about it every damn week then my second client on my first day of internship was a man who drank three bottles of vodka a day to maintain normal status he'd tried rehab for years and insisted that he was fine and functioning so long as he had his three bottles next day I get a client who is a complete mess she had lost her kids and had no motivation to do anything anymore she had no job no future no motivation to change that and spent most of her days just staring into space hating her life needless to say I didn't last at that internship and switched to getting a PhD a metaphysics and applied psychology instead cannot handle that kind of job massage therapist here I had a 90 year old lady on my table she was in great shape towards the end of the session she started crying and said she wants to be dead all her friends and close family were deceased then she said one day you will wanted to die too you'll be ready thanks for listening to radio TTS hit the subscribe button and activate the notification Bell for more videos click the right box for the 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Id: q6a2BbwhzM0

Length: 15min 16sec (916 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 18 2020