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As I’ve said before, the secret to my well-run, privately owned office is my secretary, who happens to be East German and could probably booby trap a group of boy scouts before they even knew what hit them. She has with her at all times her daddy’s authentic SKS—not some American or Chinese knock-off.
Thank God we’ve never had to use it, but thank God we have it, as my office has an unlocked door (I am not going to treat my patients like prisoners and buzz each one into the lobby). My office is just us two women along with a male psychologist, who is gay (I say that not because gay men are necessarily weak, but because they are at a higher risk of being attacked—look it up; it’s a fact). To be honest, I am less concerned about my patients attacking and more concerned about a random rapist wandering around our office complex. I know who my patients are. And if I had an inkling that one of my patients had designs on snuffing me out, they’d be out of the dance instantly. It’s my job to have instincts about people, and I count on them. But I don’t know every random person who might be crazy enough to barge into my office and try to rape me, my secretary, or the male gay psychologist who rents space from me.
I am very conscientious about safety and lawsuits, and so I have intimated (he’s not out, poor thing) to the psychologist who rents space from me the special category of risk that he is in and that I cannot guarantee his safety. I can’t guarantee mine or my secretary’s either. No one knows what the day will bring.
Here’s what I do know: I believe that the dance can be the self-actualization of life itself, and I believe in moving toward life, not away from it. That means that life must be protected by whatever means necessary, including death, ironically enough. In that I am in agreement with many of you.
However, my secretary knows to stand down and that non-lethal methods to threatening situations must first be attempted. While I’ve never faced a patient threatening me with a gun, I’ve always thought that if the worst happened, I would try to confuse my patient or random rapist. I might ask him a question like, “What did you have for breakfast today?” It’s such a non-sequitur that I think it could defuse the situation, and I would have the opportunity to take him/her down with non-lethal means.
Of course, if that didn’t work I do have a code word for my secretary to come out with her SKS, and I do trust her discretion. This is not a woman who kills for fun; she kills for stress relief (she helps eliminate feral animals at at a local nature reserve). Far from cold-hearted, she, as a hobby, also helps bring life into this world (as I’ve mentioned before, she delivers foals). She’s a person I can trust to do what needs to be done in all things.
I don’t carry myself; although, I do always have a good paring knife with me when the mood for an apple strikes. If my secretary were on one of her smoking breaks, I do believe I could fend for myself with a paring knife until she returned. I suppose all this is to say that as a psychiatrist, I feel very safe. And that goes back to a point I made earlier. As psychiatrists, what are we worth if we can’t predict the patients with aims on taking us out? When in doubt, refer out.
Really, Novopsych, really? A woman is dead, a family is in mourning, a Doctor has been wounded and placed in the terrible situation of needing to fire a gun on a patient, and you pick this thread to Troll in. Not cool!
