I never knew that being attacked came with mental health work. My job, on occasion, at the Mental Health Urgent Care Center, put me at risk. Our job was to keep the pressure off of the local jails and psychiatric hospitals by handling those people who were highly unstable. From week one, psychotic types were first funneled to us at a slow rate, and then soon it became a scramble to provide help to the people in the Los Angeles area who were falling through the cracks. We did our best to stabilize the people entering our doors, but if we couldn’t, we’d send them to local psychiatric hospitals after placing them on a 5150 hold.

I held an LPS license for 8 of my 11 years. This license allowed me to place people on a 5150 hold. I took this aspect of my job very seriously because I was literally given the power to take away a person’s rights and place them in a psychiatric hospital for 72 hours. I did my best to keep people out of the hospital, but they had to really be dangerous to themselves or others, or gravely disabled for me to write a hold. First, I was to interview them, assess their level of dangerousness, and if they weren’t up to snuff I’d write out the paperwork. The process was to write the hold, call a nearby psychiatric hospital to see if they had any openings, secure a bed, call an ambulance for transport, and once the ambulance arrived assist them in placing the individual on a gurney for transport. 90% of the time it went like clockwork. The majority of people wanted to be hospitalized because they couldn’t trust themselves. Some of them weren’t so cooperative.  

And about the ones that weren’t cooperative. We’d see them enter the unit and have that crazy look in their eyes. Some were seeing things that weren’t there, or hearing things that others couldn’t and when those voices were telling them to harm or kill people, my red flag would go up.

Periodically the clients would get aggressive. We understood it and had each other’s backs. By law, we couldn’t fight a person with mental illness but were trained on how to dodge them and take them down in a nonviolent way.  

My supervisor one day was walking past a line of clients from another unit, who were waiting in line for the lunchroom when one of them yelled at him and smacked him in the jaw so hard he broke it. From that moment, I walked through that hall with a coworker every chance I got. The people in the overall hospital were on holds for as long as 5 years and it took specialized staff to handle them. Our clients were still in public, though my job was to choose which ones needed to be hidden from society for a limited time.   

The first fight I saw in our unit was with one of our social workers. He was a 12 stepper, who wasn’t college educated but was very known in the substance treatment field. Not an opposing-looking man at all, but whatever the client said to him pushed a button and both of them were up and fighting like little girls. It took everything in me to not laugh. I learned to fight from the side, elbows out, but both of these guys were fighting elbows in like they were bitch slapping each other. I wish I videoed it.

I was only attacked one time in my 11 years at the Urgent Care, and it wasn’t even a client I was working with. Normally clients are brought back to a big waiting area and if they needed a shower we’d help them, or we would get them a meal if they looked malnourished, otherwise they watched T.V. until we called their name.

The client in question was transported to us from the Harbor UCLA psychiatric ward and had been a frequent flyer there for years. There was a population of homeless people who refused to change their lot, used the psychiatric hospitals for free lodging and food, and UCLA was tired of this guy, so they sent him our way.

When I arrived on the shift this man was sleeping on a chair and I was amazed at how huge he was. He reminded me of the guy in the movie “The Green Mile”. Maybe 275 lbs and 6’4” in height. When he woke from his nap, he wanted to have lunch and I took his order and walked to the lunch room, who made our meals for us. Lunch had ended and they offered me dinners so I ordered two. Upon re-entering our unit, I handed him a dinner, which was twice the size of the bread sandwich and chips in our lunches, and he complained.

“Where’s my lunch!” He shouted.

I told him that they didn’t have any lunches left but I got him two dinners and I would warm up the second meal if he was hungry after the first meal.  

He took a few steps to sit at the table I placed the meal on, then swung his huge fist at me from 10 feet away and connected. I was shocked and so was he because I took his best shot. Suddenly he was seeing red and I dashed behind a nearby couch to get out of his line of fire. What did he do? He picked up a chair and started to pound the hell out of that couch!

I looked around for staff to help but they were nowhere to be found! Usually, we would call a code over the public address system and people from around the hospital would rush in to protect their own.

Slam. Slam. Slam. The guy continued his onslaught, breaking the vertical blinds behind me and denting up the wall. Then suddenly our little office manager who must have stood at 5’1” came into the room in shock.

I took that as a diversion and dashed out of the room and bolted for safety. The police were called in and the guy was handcuffed and taken to jail. The police asked me if I wanted to press charges but I didn’t want to have any more dealings with him and just asked them to take him away.

One time in 11 years, I feel blessed that my jaw wasn’t broken.

From that moment on, I leaned on my intentions. I would set intentions to be safe and have cooperation from the clients, and fortunately never had another issue again.

There was one more incident that came to mind regarding a psychotic man who needed to be hospitalized but became too unruly and started to act like a bully. He was about 6’2” tall and must have weighed 400 lbs and it was all muscle. This guy refused to go into the hospital and a code was called, the support team gathered and cowered in the sight of this guy who just laughed. He chuckled as he walked off the unit and got stuck at the front entry because it was a locked door that nobody opened for him. Now the guy began to escalate. It took the Long Beach Police 15 minutes to show up and who did they bring? One guy.  

Policemen weren’t allowed to bring their weapons into our facility because in the past a gun was taken from a policeman by a psychotic client who killed somebody with it.

So, here is this policeman, who stood about 5’4 and maybe 150 lbs, standing in front of a mountain of a man without any weapon, with all of us in the background in awe. This guy had to face down a man three times his size all on his own.

“Listen,” the policeman began, “I represent all of Long Beach P.D. and if you don’t cooperate with me, our force is going to come down hard on you. It’s your choice. You either sit down on the gurney or in the back of a police car, which do you choose?”

The man took in a breath in defeat and sat down. After he was secured in restraints all of us applauded the officer.

Yep, just another day at the Mental Health Urgent Care Center. The interesting fact was that I loved working there. Most clients were manageable and when they weren’t I’d send the Psychiatrist in to treat them. They normally came in for medication and our doctor was happy to oblige and usher them out of Dodge.

I’ve toyed around with the idea of writing out a sitcom about that unit because every disorder in the diagnostic manual showed up there. The show would educate people on mental illness, show them that the staff is just as crazy, and also show some heartwarming stories of miracles that took place that still baffle me to this day.