I'm a new nurse working at 2 snfs and I have to see signs in some of the offices say things like "Nurses are ordinary people with extraordinary hearts." What if I'm a nurse and I can't help but be cold and uncaring to everyone because of my condition?
I have had several patients pass away and I tried to feel bad for some of them. I think I feel a little bit shocked/sad for some patients who've passed away but it's not like I run home and cry myself to sleep whenever a patient dies. I just think that the deceased resident was suffering and it was their time to go and I move on.
Sociopaths don't usually feel sorry for anyone and I don't feel like I have to genuinely care about anyone in order to do my job.
I wonder if there are any other nurses who have ASPD and how they respond when someone wrongly assumes they're very empathic or able to feel sorry for others misfortunes just because they're a nurse.
Do I have to genuinely connect with someone's emotional distress to be their nurse or can I just fake it and provide their care just because it's my job?
I have not actually been diagnosed but was told by an immediate family member that I should have been diagnosed as such.
Armchair diagnosis is a dangerous thing. I can't speak to nursing in particular since I'm just starting out, but I was a lawyer for ten years doing mostly public defense, and had a lot of contact with individuals with "formal" ASPD diagnoses. As a professional, you do have to be able to put yourself in someone's shoes to assess their needs (or at least it's helpful), and be willing to provide the "soft" skills like comfort and reassurance. My problem was opposite to yours - I took clients' screw ups as personal failures, and took them home with me (figuratively), with a lot of trouble letting it go. I still get anxious just seeing courtroom stuff on TV. It sounds like you're able to empathize in the sense of willingness to perceive others' needs and address them. The ability to maintain objectivity and emotional distance might be a plus. I question whether ASPD is an appropriate label for you (we all have some antisocial traits) - ASPD isn't just a lack of empathy or emotional entanglement with others. It's also characterized by a persistent disregard for the rights of others, emotional manipulation, behavioral issues, etc. I'm not an expert, but I did work with psychologists and ASPD individuals quite a bit doing criminal defense, although there are higher functioning folks than the ones I met (mostly in corporate boardrooms and high office, hah). So maybe don't label yourself and just be aware that you may have to make an effort to double-check that you're accurately assessing psychosocial needs and addressing them.
A good way to avoid burnout is being able to compartmentalize. If it's done well it may not be distinguishable from indifference. Sounds like you don't have a problem there.
They don't need you being tearful and blubbering all over the place...For your own sanity its a good thing to not go home every night and cry over patients. It's not to say you cant have a moment of "could we have done anything differently" but you have to find a way to leave work at work
I don't think people who worry about their patients always cry over them. I would think some of the most sensitive people on earth rarely ever cry.
You don't have to be attached to patients or cry for them to have empathy. There are varying ways for empathy to express itself. Empathy makes me frantic sometimes. Empathy caused me to bring a drink to a screaming, cursing patient once. I could tell he was thirsty.
What concerns me about sociopaths is that they start fights. I would worry that people quit because of them.
I would think if someone wonders if they're a sociopath they should look for empathy inside themselves. Empathy can fade when you're under stress or if you're tired or feeling ill. There are certain people who don't bring out this trait in others.
Hi Klone. People's job satisfaction and effectiveness often coincide with being in a position conducive to one's gifting. In nursing, that can be precarious. A person with a high level of mirror neurons will be stimulated by crisis and can create a dependency on the adrenaline rushes they receive. But they also tend to cause burnout and reduce effectiveness. A person with a high level of mirror neurons is in a bit of a nursing conundrum. They have often chosen this career because of their deeply caring nature. That same profound caring nature is highly vulnerable to nursing burnout. Selecting an area of nursing with less death and suffering will help nurses with a high volume of mirror neurons to be more emotionally stable in their work. However, they will also tend to have slightly less satisfaction. There is an excellent book called "Boundaries" by John Townsend and Henry Cloud. It can help.
Another study revealed that M.D.s tend to experience a reduction in mirror neurons during med school! The exposure and clinical focus do help rewrite our synaptic selves. However, the overall amount is not going to create a new personality. Your friend needs wisdom, emotional awareness, and perhaps the discipline to adjust to a different specialty that would be less stressful. If we were all wiser in this, we would have fewer nurses leaving the field and more changing to complementary specialties.
Oh, I saw that Movie, A Good Nurse and the watched a documentary on him. What a trip! And to top it all off, he kept getting hired at other institutions and administrators more or less enabled his behavior!
The killer male nurse was scary, but the administrators were even more so.
Oh yea, I saw this too. I kept wondering why all of sudden the fluid bags were wrapped in that hard plastic we need scissors to cut off and if someone removed that extra plastic off the bag we were told not to use it. And then I saw that movie and documentary.
This guy was a serial killer who just happened to be a nurse.
And all these people you describe have been diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder or sociopathy?
You have to remember that sociopaths seldom get professional help because they're not suffering. Most of them probably do not have a formal diagnosis unless they have either been to jail or a mental ward where medical intervention is pushed on them.
Specializes in Nurse Leader specializing in Labor & Delivery.
Alnitak7 said:
You have to remember that sociopaths seldom get professional help because they're not suffering. Most of them probably do not have a formal diagnosis unless they have either been to jail or a mental ward where medical intervention is pushed on them.
My point was simply to illustrate that it's statistically highly unlikely that that poster works with a large number of sociopaths, and they were simply using "sociopath" as a descriptor for "coworkers I don't like"
judi moretti
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Just plain NO, you cannot be a nurse