Child psych unit

I had an "Alternate Site Visit" today. This is an attempt on the professors to show us more than one side of psychiatric nursing. So, I was assigned to go to the child psychiatric floor at the hospital. It was very, very hard, but not for the reasons that I expected. I expected to see kids that were completely out of control and/or medicated so heavily that they were partially sedated. Instead, I met a few kids that seemed pretty okay and a couple of autistic boys.

One of the autistic boys ran up and hugged me as soon as I walked in the room. He would then grab my hand and pull me around the floor every time he got excited about something because he wanted to share it with me.

The hard part started when I was helping a little girl clean her room after breakfast. She started talking about her family and showed me a picture of her dad. Then she told me a little about her mom and her grandparents. And finally she said, "My uncle isn't nice. He threw me down the stairs and gave me two black eyes. Then he beat up my mom." She said this in the same matter of fact voice that she had used to talk about her grandparents. I was at a complete loss for words. Later on, I got the chance to look at some of the kids charts. It turns out that this little girl had been brought into the hospital when she started trying to stab her grandmother with a steak knife. She was discharged this afternoon.

Another one of the kids had been brought in because of repeated attempts to run away from home. He even tried to jump out of a 12-story building in order to get away. Last winter he was found by a snowplow driver walking along the side of the road without a jacket or shoes on. Sounds crazy, huh? Until you keep reading and see that his father beat his mom and he witnessed it. He and his mother went to live with other relatives a couple of times, but his father always found them. His mom is currently living in a battered women's shelter, which this kid has also tried to run away from.

I was only on this floor for 4 hours, but I still got to spend enough time with the kids to see that they were all capable of being very smart and very sweet. They just didn't have the chance at home and all they had been exposed to was violence and abuse. I would have been running away or stabbing people too.