Hey everybody, this is Tina again with good nurse, bad nurse and Alison is here with us once again. Hi Alison. Hey guys. So this week we decided to do our episode sort of based around psychiatric sort of things. The bad nurse story is very sad and has to do with mental illness and so we kind of wanted to do a story, a news story and then also our good nurse story is going to be, it's going to revolve around that as well. First of all, I just want to thank you guys so much for all the love you've been showing us lately because we have been popping up on some charts all across all across the world. It's kinda crazy. Uh, we, they recently kind of changed the way they were doing the whole charting system. Apple podcasts did and we were kind of like, well, when they restructure all this, we didn't know what was going to happen.

But you guys have really been showing off because we have been pretty consistently up in the top thirties in the documentary category, which is the category that we happen to fall under. And Apple podcasts. So that's a pretty big deal. And every time I'd check it and get an email, I'm just always so shocked to see that we consistently hang out in there. And then also we're shit. We've got people listening in, a lot of people in Canada, we are consistently charting in Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia and Norway and recently just popped into Mongolia. I'm not sure who is listening in Magalia but we appreciate you so much, whoever you are because we actually hit number one for the episodes, like the one of the episodes hit the number one spot and we're just like, how is this happening? We're just so happy though.

Just absolutely thrilled. And we appreciate you guys so much for being so loyal because the reason that you get into those charts to begin with is because you have a very consistent loyal listenership. Cause it's like the same people like subscribe. A lot of people subscribe and they listen consistently every week. So that's how we know you guys are amazing and we're just so happy and very, very thankful. So we will go ahead and start talking about this new story. Once again, I'm just horrified at are sometimes things that our healthcare system or I don't know who to blame on this, but this story is out of Portland, Oregon. So it says on a risk 40 degree afternoon, two days before Thanksgiving, Portland police responded to a call from the city psychiatric hospital and when they got there they found a man sitting on the ground in the ambulance Bay. He was handcuffed in shivering and he, all he had on was a tee shirt and shorts in 40 degree weather. I'm just, I'm really getting absolutely sick of reading these stories. I, it's one thing about doing this podcast, of course, you know, you're looking for stuff like this and it, I'm just horrified at how many of these stories are out there. What is going on Allison?

I don't know. But like you said, it's easy to find. This is not the first time that I've heard about a patient being discharged in the cold in thin clothing and just not prepared for the elements.

Right.

So I think it is a popular thing that's happening. It's horrible. It makes me mad as well. And I think it's just because people don't know how to deal with, they don't have the patients or the staff or the time to deal with people that are mentally ill. Exactly. I feel like they're just pushing it off on somebody else. Especially in this, the scenario

in this scenario for sure. But I I, yeah, exactly what you said. There's not enough staff, there's not enough resources. People don't know how to handle a situation like this. The security guard told the officers that the man had been released from the unity center for behavioral health, but that he wouldn't leave. So the guard told police that the man apparently had taken crystal meth and that he should go to detox. And then the officer who was actually specially trained for crisis intervention saw the man muttering unintelligibly. It says in his, he and his partners didn't notice any signs of intoxication, but they actually realized the man was suffering a mental health crisis and told the guard that they couldn't take him to a detox clinic because they didn't feel like that's what he needed. And then the guard urged them to arrest the man for trespassing on hospital property and for harassing a therapist earlier.

And so what this says is this scenario is exactly the type of problem identified earlier this year by the nonprofit disability rights in Oregon describing how hospitals rely on police to arrest discharge patients for trespassing, criminalizing mental illness. And this is, we've talked about this so many times on this show. This is a cycle. So many people homeless, they're either homeless or they are in the hospital or they're in jail. And there's like this cycle that goes. So, and a lot of these people do suffer from mental illness. It's not always, some people say, Oh, they're on drugs. Well, the, sometimes the drugs or the alcohol is a means of coping with mental illness. It's not always, people just want to blame. I think people deal with this, like they cope with this issue because you feel so guilty that stuff like this happens by making it the person's fault. Oh, it's just, you know, it's their own fault. They take drugs, they, you know, they choose to do that. Hmm.

But a lot of people do cope with street drugs. Their thinking's not clear. They don't keep regular appointments. They don't see a psychiatrist or their primary care physician. And so they don't have access to medication that would help with their illnesses. So they treat it with what they can get hands on. And so that's drugs, that's alcohol. But what I thought was neat about this article was that it said that the police officers had training in crisis intervention and so they were able to recognize, you know, Hey this, this guy really doesn't seem like he's needing detox. And the officers said that he, when he looked at the guy, you know, he was kind of down talking to him and that he said it looked like the guy just looked trot through him. And so he didn't, didn't think that that was necessarily drug-related. Just he could tell that this man was having a crisis.

I'm not sure. Really. I don't, it's hard to know what the answer is to something like this because it's so complicated. If you, if you go and look at that facility is, is there staff, are there enough people there to even handle a situation like that? The guard is he just completely exhausted from situations like this happening all the time. Is he tired of seeing therapists being abused by, by patients with mental illness? I mean, most people who suffer from mental illness are not violent, but it can happen. You know, that you can have altered mental status or you can have Burt fits of outbursts or whatever that of course that happens and you just, it's kind of hard to know all of the details and all of the complexities that go into a situation like this. But I do know that we don't have enough resources for mental health issues in this country and certainly in the state that we live in.

Yeah. Well I think the answer is that we need more facilities. We need more resources. How we get those. I don't know. I will say that our security, they are very good at identifying what patients are mentally ill and what patients are alert and oriented and are capable of making decisions where we work. I will say that our security department does a great job of distinguishing the difference between those patients. And you know, just the other day went into the hospital, I'm on Thanksgiving to deliver some PAs and there was a patient, I couldn't tell if he had been discharged from a floor or the ER, but he was there in the lobby. Similar situation, you know, he had a bag with them and there was some, there was security there and they were there with him. I was there for probably at least 30 minutes and they weren't arresting him.

I could hear them talking to him and they were trying to find him a rod, trying to find him a place to go, trying to help out those situations. So I don't think that all security officers at all facilities are as trained as where we work and I think they're all capable of mass situation with that situation. That could have been the only security officer at that whole facility. Well that's true. We don't know what those circumstances are. But luckily this guy had some heroes and the officers that did show up instead of just being like, yeah this is a problem, we'll, we'll take him back to jail. Cause he had just been released from jail 24 hours before this happened. Yeah. Yeah.

It's so common. That's exactly the problem. And they talked about it being a problem there in Oregon. It's a problem all over the country. It's just a problem. There's not enough resources. So there is this vicious cycle of, of mental health patients and people suffering from substance use disorder. A combination of the two, just this vicious cycle of going between homelessness and the hospital into to jail. And this, you know, you get released from one and out to the other and it's just a mess. Well we'll keep talking about stuff like this because I don't know what else to do other than bring awareness about it and have people talking about it and maybe at some point something will be done. So before we get into talking about our bad nurse this week, Oh, we wanted to just spend a second or two to talk about our sponsor.

Incredible health. You guys know we're picky about what companies we allow to sponsor our show because we want to make sure whoever we promote that they're consistent with our values and that they're not going to take advantage of our listeners bombarding them with emails and text messages and that sort of thing. So we do have incredible healthcare staffing agency. They connect nurses to permanent positions and hospitals. They are kind of like a dating service CPA. You sit and like scroll through people. That's what I see the nurse managers sitting there kind of scrolling through, swipe left, swipe left, swipe right, swipe or whatever. I don't know which one you do. I've been married too long. I don't know. But I mean that's sort of what it's like. Is it not there? They're like, you create a profile, you make yourself put your best self out there and all this, all your wonderful certifications and your accomplishments, your degrees and your history and what your, which you can do.

And then the nurse managers like you, Alison, you kind of scroll through there and you're like, okay, this one looks like a good fit. I think it's great. I can get on there and look for people that are interested in trauma and specifically trauma. Exactly. They're in a few States or in California, Texas, New York, Florida and Illinois. They are going to be expanding soon into other States. There they were in over 150 hospitals. So I know for me, I do not like the process of having to go enter all of that information on multiple sites for different hospitals. So this is going to be so much better to be able to go to one place. You just kinda like sit back and wait for them to contact you and ask for an interview. I mean I think it's great. I'm excited. So if you guys are going to be looking for a job anytime in the near future, go onto incredible health.com forward slash good nurse and create a profile.

So we will get into our bad nurse story. So incredibly sad. This is the story of a surgical nurse. Her name is Marilyn Lamach. She was a surgical nurse and she's actually married to an ER doctor. They lived in this really nice Victorian home it was had at the time. It had been built for like 127 years. It was really, really neat house and they live near a college campus so they think it was probably like the president of the college, the president's house kind of thing. It's at one point cause it was just right across the street. The neighbors said that they would watch the three children growing up and just, he said it was just an obviously loving home. They said the harshest discipline you ever saw coming out of the house was like a timeout, you know, an occasional timeout. They, you always saw one of the parents with the kids walking them to school and that sort of thing.

Just a really nice home. So really shocking what ended up happening. But at some point within previous weeks before this happened, he, he did say that he remembered thinking that David Marylands has been, the doctor seemed like he was moving because he was taking a lot of things out of the house and he noticed he saw less and less of the three children. And especially over the course of the past few days a would usually see Nicholas outside playing with his friends, but realized he hadn't really seen him recently. Any thought that that was weird. So Marilyn actually had filed for divorce in April of 1997 and this happened in March of 1999 so I year or a couple of years before she filed for divorce, but then they had a reconciliation and she asked that the divorce case divorce case was dismissed and it was that same year that then I guess things didn't, we're still not going well.

And that's just kind of how those things are. You know, you, I guess they're having trouble, they don't want to break up their family for the children. You don't want to take it because Juniata you separate. And then their children, they don't have mom and dad both living under one roof and it just creates all these problems. So then the parents are just trying everything they possibly can. So that sort of went on for a couple of years. She filed it again for divorce and June of 1998 so about a year later, she said there was an reckons irreconcilable differences and that they were tearing the marriage apart. She asked for child support and the paper said that she and her husband had been living under the same roof, but they had been living separately. And I've also heard of this happening. I would think, Alison, that this would be, it would be really hard to do, especially if you, if she's using words like tearing the marriage apart, I would imagine they're probably arguing so, Oh, how awful for these kids that they must be no telling what in the world they're saying.

Right. And I think that it's easy to say if you're having trouble with your marriage, don't stay for the kids just to make it work. I can tell you from personal experience, that was my childhood and I think it probably would've been better had my parents went their separate ways as seeing the child of that. And now that I'm a mom, I kind of see the other side, but my husband and I always show go. If we give, we ever get a divorce, he'll just move to the basement because at this point, too much trouble to separate everything out. But, but we have what we have fully, no intentions of ever doing that. But I think it is hard for especially, I mean these kids were small. I think the oldest one was like seven or eight. Yeah. And that I think that's confusing for them too when they see mom and dad there, but they pick up on a lot more than we know. Oh yeah. They pick up on interactions, they pick up on tones when people are fighting, they know that. And so I think a lot of people think they can hide it from their kids.

Right, for sure. I mean, if you're, unless you're an Academy award winning actor, I don't know that you should lean on your acting skills to try to create some phony happy home for your children because they know. Right. And so many times I've heard people say that their parents thought that they didn't know that it wasn't a good marriage growing up and then it new and they knew. And the parents were like shocked. Like, what do you know? I w we never, we never fought in front of you. We never did. They know. Yeah, we're not stupid. So on July 29th of that year, 1998 she filed papers with the court asking that she be given exclusive possession of the home. She wanted him to move out and she wanted to be able to stay there because living in the same house there was causing her serious episodes of stress which have resulted in physical symptoms.

So somehow she, she was getting so stressed out that she was having some sort of physical symptoms and she was asking basically for the judge to make him leave. And David thought that he did not want to be forced to move out. And he said he'd been making the mortgage payment, the mortgage payment was like $3,500 a month. And, and he was saying, well, I'm the one that is making the payment, I'm sure. And she was a nurse, she was educated, she was able to work, but she probably stayed home with the children. And this is another case of where, you know, when one person, it's usually the woman decides to stay at home because they want their child to have a loving home and they want, they don't want their child to have to go to daycare or whatever. And then the wife or whoever it is, it's usually the woman sacrifices.

15 to 20 years because they're not working, they're not in the workforce. They're not building up their, their career and moving up the ladder and increasing their salary they, and so then all of a sudden here it is, 20 years in, you know, not in this case, but you know, five years, 10 years, whatever it is into this marriage. And it looks like, well, the husband has been the one making the mortgage. Well that's because she, she couldn't work because she was taking care of the children. So I, I don't necessarily like that argument, but I guess I understand in a, in a, in a dispute, you're going to say whatever you have to say in order to get your side. And he wanted, he didn't want to have to leave the house for whatever reason.

Right. And I agree. Everybody's going to say what they, whatever it is that they need to say to fight for their case. But I will say that she most likely wouldn't have been able to afford the exactly, even with even getting alimony or child support or whatever. I mean that's, this was 20 years ago, right. So, you know, I don't know what people made 20 years ago, but I don't, I don't see her being able to take care of the house and provide for the children and you know, daily things like food and clothes and, and stuff like that.

And to me that sounds just toxic. Um, it's just terrible. But I don't, I don't really know what the answer is. I mean it's both of their home. I mean, they're, what are you going to do? So they went through a mediation process and they came to some agreements on child custody and visitation rights and they were supposed to appear in court again on February 25th of 1999 but neither of them showed up for some reason. And then on March 5th of 1999 a nine one one call came in to the Naperville police at 11:08 AM in Maryland said, my three kids are dead and I want to be dead too. But it didn't work. So during that eight minute call, she said that she had not been drinking the, the nine one one operator asked if she'd been drinking. She said she had not, she said she did not have a weapon, but she did say she had taken medication.

So when they got to her home, she shouted to them that she was upstairs. She was laying down, her daughter was laying beside her and the police discovered her two sons in their bedrooms. The two boys were found in their own beds and the girl was found of course beside her and that looked like it was most likely the the master bedroom where she was. So I mean it's just so sad. And the nine one one call was an eight minute call and it just goes on and on of her going back and forth with a nine one one operator. And when I read that call, like the, the call log to it, I was just, so, I was thinking about what in the world is this dispatcher thinking because she, the first thing she said is my children are dead. So she tried to, she tried to kill herself.

She took some sort of like Adavan, like an over tried to overdose and then she's, she'd slit her wrist and she woke up, this happened the day before and then she woke up. So what they said happened is that she, the day before made a peanut butter sandwich on a bagel and gave it to the two youngest kids. And they, they, she put sprinkled Adavan like crushed up Adavan on top of the peanut butter and the kids ate it and when they fell asleep she smothered them with a pillow. Then the oldest child was downstairs when this was going on and she had them, had that child come up and this was Nicholas and she did the same thing. She gave him something to eat that had the Adavan sprinkled on it and then she smothered him. And then I guess she staged the bodies the way they were and then lay down and thought maybe that she was not going to wake up, but how horrible. How awful.

Yeah. I can't imagine what kind of, where she was and her thinking to make that decision. And I don't know what's worse, you know, making the decision to kill your children and kill yourself or waking up afterwards and being like, I'm still here. You know, I think you and I have talked about this on another podcast that I did with you about suicide and people in the multiple attempts and how just detrimental it is on them. And I had just, this blows my mind, the idea that a mom could do this to her child. Yeah. I don't understand that. You know, and I know that people have postpartum depression. I know that people just get depressed. I get it. Life happens and people go into some really dark places. I understand that. But I, I can not put a reason behind this. I just don't, I don't understand.

Yeah. They, uh, eight hours after the bodies were discovered, police formed a screen at the rear of the house while the, the bodies of the children were wheeled into a van and she was then of course taken into custody after she was treated for her. Uh, you know, cause she had overdosed and she had cut her wrists. Then she was brought in before the judge and she didn't say anything. She just stood there. Her lawyer spoke, spoke for her and told the judge she was pleading not guilty to nine counts of first degree murder and her lawyer said that he was going to have her examined. So when she was examined by a psychiatrist they determined that she, he did not feel the defense psychiatrist did not feel that she was fit to stand trial. So ultimately a judge or jury after considering evidence has to determine whether she's fit to stay in trial.

It's not like you can just, you just have them examined by a psychiatrist and that is the final say so they can have her evaluated and the prosecutor as well had her evaluated. But the judge and jury actually decides whether or not she's fit to stand trial. What they ended up doing is they had her, David's new wife at this time because he actually remarried not long after this happened because he had a girlfriend. They had been, even though he had been living in the house and then he and he and then he left. He did have a girlfriend and this girlfriend who then became his wife shortly after all this took place, testified in court that Marilyn would call her and basically, you know, just say things like you're, you're not gonna have him. And just sort of things like that. But she wouldn't say who she was.

And so the defense said that it really wasn't fair that she was allowed to testify because there was no way really to prove that it was coming from Maryland. So the judge allowed her to get on the stand and testify that someone in a female voice called and said, you will never have him. So she was not allowed and no one was allowed. No one on the prosecution's team. She was not allowed to say Marilyn's name. And I guess that's the judge his way to have sort of keeping the jury from hearing this and saying, Oh well they're saying that she definitely did this. He wanted to make it perfectly clear that it's not 100% there's no proof that she did it. And yet it's obvious enough to everyone that that's, who else would it have been. So I guess he felt like he needed to leave the evidence in. So the defense didn't think that was fair.

Well, and they, they're, they wouldn't, you know, because they're trying to do whatever they can to help out Maryland. But I don't,

well, and that's true. I think that that's their job. You know, that's their job is to try to come up with anything. And sometimes you just think some of the stretches that these defense attorneys have to make. Yeah. Did they not have caller ID? I mean this, this happened in 1999 in 1999 there was definitely caller ID. There was caller ID in the early nineties so yeah, there was definitely caller ID in 1999 and you would think, you know, I mean,

you would think it would still be able to do like to trace calls and stuff like that. I mean I would think they would, there would have been a way to prove or at least narrow down the number, you know, that was styling or not dialing that the number that it was calling from.

They said that they think she was either using a cell phone or the fact that she was probably using a cell phone and that it was a really short colleague. She just called for just a few seconds and then hung up and that, that's the reason that they weren't able to trace it back to her. I don't know about if it's one second it comes up on your phone bill, that rats how somebody calls. So I don't really get that. But,

and I remember back then I got my first cell phone around 2000 it was two thousand ten thousand one and my parents got like a big thing in the mail that showed every call I made and it was like

number I doweled I think it had the Tom, how long the call was. I mean it was very detailed report, you know, I white back invasion of privacy here raw. So I would that they would have had access to something similar. Oh yeah. I'm sure. I have to believe that she either made the phone call from like a phone booth or something like that to where they just couldn't trace it back. It's, you know, you, you can, there's things you can do or go into, you know, go into a store or something and make a phone call. So, and I guess I didn't have a way of tracing her or detecting her voice to say definitively that it was her and it wasn't recorded. So it's not like you could go back and listen to it rap. So the defense basically just said, well she can't really assist in her defense because of her mental condition condition, but under, and this was an Illinois.

So under Illinois law, a person is presumed to be fit to stand trial. You are kind of like, you're presumed innocent. You're presumed to be fit to stand trial. In the state of Illinois, a person is not fit if she cannot understand the legal proceedings or co-op or cooperate in his or her defense. So if you're fit, everyone is fit to stand trial unless they can prove that you can't understand what's going on or cooperate and help in your own defense. And what they said is she was able to do both of those things. She could cooperate, she could tell what happened and anything that had to do with the case. She, there was nothing keeping her from doing that. And she understood what was going on. She knew exactly what was going on and they looked at it that the prosecution looked at it like, you know, you're making these phone calls to your husband's girlfriend.

And of course they're assuming that it was her making the calls so you are angry and hurt and you did this out of vindictive revenge out of hate to try to do the one thing that you knew would hurt him the most. So she, she was so upset that her husband didn't want to live with her anymore. Didn't want to be a part of their family. He didn't, you know, didn't love her, whatever it was that she was thinking that she didn't want to live anymore, but she cannot stand the thought of the children staying there after she was gone. And then living with him and his new wife and it just, the thought of that was just unbearable to her. And that to me it was so incredibly selfish. Just I do, she was suffering from some sort of mental illness because she was taking medicine, medications and this had been going on for a couple of years. So I don't doubt that she was having some problems with mental illness. But I do think that she had control of her actions and she knew exactly what she was doing.

Right. Rods. And we've talked about that before too. Hurting your children to get to the other parents. And that's something that, yeah, I just don't understand either. You know, and it frustrates me that when we talk about these stories, we are talking about like educated adults, like professionals that have invested a lot of Tom and money into their careers. And so you would expect these people to be on a higher level of thinking and a higher level of decision making. And then they do these crazy things. And I just don't, I don't know where it comes from. I just, I don't know.

I don't either. She, during court, she really, she didn't really say a whole lot. She wasn't real animated toward the end. She was an ma. The more, uh, appearances that she made, she was seeing talking with her lawyer for a few minutes, um, and inside the courtroom. And so her lot, what her lawyer said, because you know, people are like, Oh, is she's, she seems normal. She, you can just see her standing there having a conversation. She doesn't seem like a quote crazy person in their mind and in people's minds. And this was 20 years ago. We've definitely made a lot of progress in, in 20 years for as far as how people think about mental illness and understanding what it really is. But they're asking him, her, her attorney, you know, how, how is she, she seems to be fine. And he said, well, just because a person speaks to you and might even speak to you and what appears to be a lucid manner doesn't mean that they're speaking rationally. That doesn't mean that they're speaking in reality. The question is, what is she communicating? So, and you and I know that we, we've got patients who will look right at us and you'll just think, well, you might even be under the impression that they're 100% with it and know exactly what's going on. And they're completely alert and oriented in your, at some point in the conversation they say something so off the wall that you're like, Whoa.

And you're realizing, you realize, okay, I get it. I'm talking because they can carry on a complete conversation that sounds totally appropriate until they say something about the cat in the room or something and you're just like, Oh, Oh, okay. So I mean that's just the way that that is the reality of someone like that. And also just because she seems okay now, maybe she's on medication now, maybe her medication was completely out of balance. Then maybe she had a break, but she's better now because she's being medicated. I am being treated. It's kind of hard to say these. It's, it's not a cut and dried situation when it comes to to mental health issues for sure.

So yeah, there's, there is no black and white when it comes to mental illness in any of it, you know, whether it's the act itself, it's the, you know, whatever led up to the decision to commit a crime or to hurt themselves. And then even I think with the, the law and the punishment and kinda what happened happens after, you know, that's none of that is black and white either. You know, I mean, I think there are cases in situations where it's like, okay, this person committed murder, they intended to do it so they should have this punishment. Right. But when it comes to people that have mental illness, we, a lot of times we put them in jail, but that's not always probably where they should be. They, I think there are some that should definitely be spending there now. I do I think they should be released because they have a mental illness or they did whatever crime they did because of that.

No, I think that they should still serve, serve time, serve a punishment, but not necessarily always in jail. I think that, you know, we should have more correctional facilities that are for people with mental illness. Oh absolutely. Get them the appropriate care that they need. You know, cause a lot of times they're getting, they're going to be in there for a long time. They might be serving life sentences or 10, 20, 30 years and it's not going to make anything better. When you put mentally ill people in a, um, in a correctional facility with all these other people, they're going to continue to, even if they're all medicine, you know, they're not, they're probably not getting the counseling or therapy that they might need. And you know, who's to say that they don't go on and do other things while they're in, you know, while they're in custody. It's just

Sam unfortunate thing is there's, it's, you have to protect society. You can't leave everyone at risk, but at the same time, it's not really fair to put someone who is mentally ill, who's suffering from mental illness into a prison full of people who maybe did what they did, um, you know, deliberately and knew exactly what they were doing. And, and I don't really think anybody knows where Maryland falls in that because some people have said that she knows that there's no way she could have been this wonderful doting, perfect mother for all these years and then turn around and do this to her children only based on revenge to her husband. Like it's, it's inconsistent with the, the kind of mother that she was. And so, but then others say, well, her anger and how she felt about her husband was just stronger than the love that she had for her children.

And she's somehow justified in her mind doing what she did. So it's there, it's impossible really to know. They did convict her however of, of murder. And the judge sentenced her to life in prison without the possibility of parole. And he said that he wanted her to ponder her terrible acts for the rest of her days. He said that it's appropriate that every day as you look at the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the bars, you will see the faces of these young children and hear these young voices asking you why mom, we loved you, mom. Why did you do this to us? And he did add that he would order psychiatric services for her. So you will always maintain the capacity to understand the horror of your crime. So I don't really, the fact that he would say that to me, it almost sounds like the judge felt like she was mentally ill and that he didn't care.

I don't, it's kinda hard for me to understand that. It's kind of like saying, I know you're mentally ill and that's why you did what you did, but I want to give you medicine and treatment to help you get better. Just so that just to torture you further mentally so that you can always remember and have the ability to understand. I don't understand that remark. Yeah, I was shocked when I read that. I was like, he really said that to her. There's emotion there, you know when he's like, I want you to look at the walls and the ceiling and the bars. I want you to wake up every single day and remember what you did. You know? And like, she wouldn't, I mean I'm a mom, you're a mom. If we did something like that, we would wake up every day and remember that, I'm sure there's been something that your children have done.

Small river fell off the couch at four months old because I didn't know he could roll over. I remember that. And he's almost nine and you know, we're all okay from that. But you remember as a mom, you remember little things like that that felt big at the time, but are probably insignificant. So she will, whether he wants her to or not, she's going to wake up every day and live with it. So that alone is punishment enough, whether you, whether you put me in jail or not. Waking up and knowing that I didn't have my children and that they were not here because of what I did, that would be punishment enough. So that was a pretty, pretty intense statement to make for a judge to mate. I know, I really, I didn't really understand it. I'm in, this was, I mean it was 20 years ago.

So we have hopefully come a lot farther than that. And understanding mental illness, her husband at the end of a trial, they sometimes or will allow family to do victim impact statements. Her husband took a moment to describe the children and he said before he had introduced each child, he said, let me, let me tell you a little bit about, and then each of the children, so let me tell you a little bit about Nicholas. He said he was his oldest child. He was a good student who loved to learn and dress up as a policeman or secret agent. And then he said, let me tell you a little bit about Emily. She was a budding artist. He said, and his younger son, Thomas, is the happiest child. He said he's the happiest child. I've known that. His greatest thrill I think was every day. So I guess that's the end of our story is just so incredibly sad.

And she's to this day still sitting in prison. She was 40 what? 40 44 at the time that she's in her sixties now. [inaudible] yeah, it's very tragic. Hey, que or in a commercial. So we got to talk fast. Let's do it. Okay, so I think I know the answer to this question, but have you ever signed up for a travel nurse agency and immediately regretted it when you started getting all those texts and emails? Sadly, Tina, yes, I have. Okay, well, trusted health is a nurse travel agency that's going to change all of that. They make it simple and fast to go online and sign up. And then you immediately start seeing job opportunities that are tailored to your interests and you can even see the pay sounds too good to be true, Dena. Well, the best part is there are no recruiters, no unwanted emails and no unwanted text messages.

No recruiters. I'm going to need some help. Where are we going to go if we have all these questions, right? Right. Well they do have nurse advocates who are there to answer any questions. They'll help guide you through the process, but they're not commission-based so they're not going to try to pressure you into taking a job that you don't want. Cool beans. Cool beans. Well tell them what to sign up cause we were running out of time. Yeah, okay. Right, right. So you guys, if you're even a little curious about travel nursing and you want to help support our little podcast here at good nurse bad nurse, please go to www.trustedhealth.com forward slash good nurse and follow the steps to completing the signup process. It's real important that you complete the whole process for us to get credit and we would really appreciate the support.

Remember to be sure and put forward slash good nurse at the end of the URL when you go to their website. So they'll know we sent you their trusted health. They're not just an agency, they are movement. So that will bring us to our good nurse story and I wanted to talk about a nurse who's really accomplished a lot in the in the field of mental health. So it was looking at that and just kind of looking at the different nurses who've done things and I was like, I remember Dorothea Dix, I learned about her in nursing so we can go, we can go all the way back and talk about her. Why not? She was early 19th century activist. She drastically changed the medical field during her lifetime. She made a lot of accomplishments. She was, she championed causes for mental illness for indigenous populations.

Of course they sometimes go hand in hand, not always and openly challenged. 19th century notions of reform and illness. She sounds like she was kind of ahead of her time a little bit. I mean we're talking about 20 years ago and saying that that we hadn't come very far just 20 years ago. This is over a hundred years ago. So she was born in Hampton, Maine in 1802. And uh, we don't know a whole lot about her childhood, but we think that our parents suffered from alcoholism and that her father was abusive. And I think sometimes, and okay. I've had, I've, I've gotten my hand slapped a little bit when talking about mental health issue issues on the show because people get sensitive when you start talking about these things. And so if I say something that's offensive, I'm really sorry, I don't ever mean to do that. But one time we, and I don't remember who my cohost was, but we were talking about mental illness and we kind of joked around about a little bit about how providers who go into mental illness or go into mental health, like psychiatrists or psychologists or even nurses who go into psychiatric nursing, do that because they suffer from some sort of mental health issues themselves.

And that's just, that's sort of a stereotype. And it's definitely something that, it's something that people joke around about and even people in the mental health field, anyone that I know who's in that field kind of will make a joke like that. And so, but at the same time I definitely don't want to perpetual promote stereotypes and I don't think that it's healthy to do that. But that being said, I think that it's not uncommon for people who have suffered some sort of loss, tragedy, illness in some way for it to spark an interest for them to go into that as a career at some point later on, I think we've talked about, you know, people who had, who were ill as a child and grew up to be a cardiologist who had heart problems growing up or they were in a hospital with lung issues and they grew up to be a nurse.

So they, because you, when you are experiencing that, sometimes you think, wow, this is really an injustice or I really want to do something about this. Maybe, maybe you were in foster care and you had to deal a lot with social workers and you either saw that there was a need for more social workers or for better social workers. And so you grew up to be a social worker or, so I don't think it's uncommon for our experiences to spark an interest in our career choices that I definitely don't want to, uh, be promoting stereotypes for sure. But it sounds like that one of the very first nurses who dealt with mental health issues, probably from what we know, maybe had some, some experience with seeing family members that were dealing with, with, with things like that. And she moved to Boston. I don't know what it is about Boston.

Every time I turn around I'm talking about Boston. I don't know why. I swear I don't. The I F I find them all the time. I'm like, I'm not sure what's going on. Boston, it's a big city. I know that it pops up all the time, but she, she did go to school in Boston and was a tutor. She became ill several times, couldn't teach. And one time while she was sick, one of her doctors said that she suggested she spent some time in Europe. So while she's visiting, she met with a group of reformers that wanted to change the way mental people who were suffering from mental illness were cared for. So then when she came back to the United States, it sort of sparked an interest in her to tour hospitals across the country and she would report her findings to politicians and push States to care for the unfortunate.

And even though a lot of politicians disagreed with her work, she just kept going and eventually established a silence in New Jersey, North Carolina and Illinois. She worked to pass federal legislation that would create a national asylum through the, uh, even though the bill didn't pass and then toured overseas reporting on the conditions of hospitals and various countries. So she just did a lot of work trying to make a difference. And so I feel like this, she's really a, just a really neat person because not a lot of people have the fortitude that it takes to actually follow through. A lot of people maybe have good intentions, but it's one thing to want to make a change and want to make a difference with a whole nother thing to actually be able to do that.

Yeah. And she, you know, she was, this is in a time where women weren't, as wa held [inaudible] to, they weren't quite as respected. And so to be a woman and to be touring these hospitals and giving your opinion to politicians, um, and stayed in your ground when they didn't want to hear it and you kept telling them anyway, you know, and I even read that when she went on to work in the civil war that doctors, you know, she was, she was the superintendent of army nurses for the union army and doctors weren't happy about having a female nurse. They didn't like it, but she kept doing it. She pushed on, she took care of union soldiers. She took care of everybody and she was pushing for higher standards for other nurses that were in her army and pushed for training. Just, she really kind of was a trailblazer I think, for our career path. It said that she appointed more than 3000 of the army nurses. So herself, she pointed them, you know? Yeah. I don't know that I've, in six years as a manager, I, I haven't hired, you know, 3000 people maybe like if you combined every single person ever like secretaries and you know, texts and Ahrens and everything. But I mean that's, it's very impressive.

Oh, I agree. She, she did so, so much. Not only in working to try to make a change, but she also raised funds for building monuments to honor, honor to see soldiers and she continued to fight for social reform all throughout her life and her work in support of better care for the mentally ill culminated in the restructuring of many hospitals, both in the United States and abroad. So, and this, this article is from a women history.org and I just think that's really cool and I think it's good to highlight and remember people from even a long time ago because what she has done sort of paved the way for, for any progress that we have now. So I guess that does it for this episode of good nurse banners. Thank you, Alison for coming on the show again. You're welcome. I always have so much fun when I come on here.

Well, you guys go on to Instagram, Facebook and tell us hello, good nurse, bad nurse on Instagram and GNB and podcast on Facebook. You can find us on the web at good nurse, bad nurse.com and you can send me emails and let me know if you have any stories that you'd like us to tell. Yeah, you guys have been sending some really good stories. I really appreciate it. Trying to make it a little database of them. So thank you guys so much. We appreciate you listening and appreciate use of all your support and encouraging words, and we want you to always remember that even if you're a bad girl or a bad boy, be a good nurse.