Excerpts from psychiatric interviews

-Why are you here? "I Bit off the ear of a cat." Why? "Why not?"

- How are you feeling today? "I'd like to make hamburgers from everyone's penis."

-Reason for admission: "Killed wife with a squeegee."

-Do you speak English?
"I speak every language in the world."
Great! Do you mind if I ask you some questions?
"All the words I say are bullshit. Music is the only truth. I can only talk to you if you have a guitar."
::proceeds to sing the entire rest of the interview::

-"Hasn't slept in three days. Presented to surgery department requesting general anesthesia so he could take a nap. Refused to speak to any psychiatrist other than Freud himself."


I adore psychiatry. I've always found normal people in all their normal craziness fascinating. I love that my actual job these days is to sit and just talk and get to hear all their stories. We also get to go to morning activities with the patients. Yesterday was karaoke. The picture you have in your head of psychiatric patients singing karaoke- pretty much exactly what it was like.

A surprising number of patients stop me in the hallway and tell me that they can see my soul. One told me that he can tell I have a good soul. That's always nice to hear. Another told me that he's the manager of the world and he's going to take care of everything for me. Yay!

Of course there's a difficult side: the depression and the suicides and the medical-student-syndrome of daily diagnosing myself with every psychiatric illness I've seen that given day. There are also these absolute moments of sanity and clarity from the patients, these moments that I really connect with them and enjoy them and understand them, and all of a sudden their psychosis, hospitalization, the things they've done without understanding what they've done, the things they lost. . . it's tragic really. And hard to wrap my head around.

So I keep talking to them and enjoying them and trying to find those little moments of connection. And hey, I'm getting school credit for singing karaoke.