Very bizarre afternoon and feel out of sorts

[Iwashopingnottobreakmyduck]

Drove 3 hours to visit MIL with DH and older children.

Walking back from the pub - met a man in a jacket, sweatpants and hat. He asked if we could call an ambulance, I asked why and he said he felt dizzy and started to collapse. DH phoned an ambulance. The guy told me his name, age and said he had epilepsy. He collapsed on the ground and started to fit violently.

An A and E consultant also walking past put him in recovery and numerous people stopped and asked to help. 45 minutes waiting in the freezing cold for an ambulance. Occasionally he came round and ‘fitted’. My daughter gave up her coat for his head support.

The ambulance arrived 45 minutes later and we were promptly told it was all a big con. This man is well known to them. He had appeared in court over it - calling ambulances out etc and abusing paramedics etc

We stood back and sure enough after the paramedics said they weren’t taking him to hospital and told him to get up and that he had enough attention etc he started being abusive to them and got up and we were shocked.

According to ambulance staff he is not either mentally ill or epileptic like he told us, that’s what they said.

DH has driven home and I feel very out of sorts. I had my head down listening to his breathing and he had drooled all over my daughter’s coat I held his hand for 45 minutes. No alcohol or drugs involved. According to a local man he does this every few days and there is a court order to stop him from doing it and they have sentenced him on previous ocassions. The police may be in touch with us. DH says he feels upset and used and of course was on the phone to 999 for 45 minutes, a crew was diverted from a real emergency. Daughter is pretty upset by it. Even the A and E doctor was taking his pulse etc - he didn’t know him as didn’t work at the local hospital.

I said to DH that whatever his needs are - they aren’t being met. I don’t know the answer or why. Or what society can do. But I feel very out of sorts.

Those are for prisoners faking seizures. If you come across someone in the street having a seizure, you look after them. Very occasionally, you’ll get an idiot attention-seeker, like this chap, but the majority of the time not. OP did the right thing.

Please look after people with epilepsy if you come across them in the street or in a shop

https://www.epilepsy.org.uk/when-someone-has-a-seizure-care

You did the right thing. The saliva will wash out. No lasting harm and you could have saved a life. I have epilepsy and there have been times nobody has helped me, police officers have accused me of being a drug addict, a sex worker and many people have walked past or made stupid comments. One man took the opportunity to start touching me inappropriately after a seizure. Please don't stop doing the right thing and caring about others. I appreciate it

Paramedics do amazing work in emergency medicine but they aren't psychiatrists. They can't say for certain he doesn't have MH issues and it sounds very much like he does if he is committing arson. These could be nonepileptic seizures (psychogenic).

Just because he doesn't have a MH diagnosis at current doesn't mean he doesn't have something complex behind his behaviour. Healthy people don't usually fake seizures for attention or start fires.

Please ignore this if you come across someone having a seizure in public. I am trained on what a nonepileptic seizure and a fake may look like compared to the presentations of typical epileptic seizures and would always treat as real first unless I had very good reason.

Call an ambulance and let them decide. Unless you are in such a role where this is a distinction you are trained to make, performing tests to check whether an emergency situation is real is so inappropriate.

I used to work in a large high street shop. We would used to have a woman who would come in and fake collapsing. We knew her, we knew she was faking but we couldn’t not call for an ambulance. It might have been real. We would look after her and shoppers would be worried, want to help etc but it’s really hard to say to people to ignore her because she’s faking it.

Agreed.

It's great that so many people on this thread are empathetic, lovely people who would feel sorry for this man and assume he must desperately need help in some other way, but unfortunately having worked as a paramedic for over a decade there are absolutely people out there who just have bad intentions.

Getting to the point of a court order banning him from calling ambulances is HUGE. This just does not happen, even to our most regular regulars. This will have been explored by multi-disciplinary teams including mental health teams to see what can be done to mitigate the high volume of calls way before getting to the stage of a court order.

There are plenty of people who very sadly suffer from psychogenic non-epileptic seizures, and these people of course absolutely do need help, care and support, albeit often mental health care rather than physical. Their symptoms are very real and frightening to them and these people are just not labelled 'fakers' like some on here have suggested.

There are also people who deliberately fake symptoms of a seizure (+/- other symptoms) and have made a conscious choice to dupe those who come to their aid as well as healthcare/medical professionals for some kind of perverse kick. I've known some patients like this to repeatedly expose themselves during these 'episodes' or put themselves in a position where they are pressed up against nurses etc. As unpalatable as it may be, we need to accept that these people exist. It sounds like the man you met in this scenario was unfortunately one of these, OP. You still did exactly the right thing going to his aid as of course you weren't to know this, and as a professional I would do the same without any knowledge of his history.

It seems that some people want to believe “this man is mentally ill and needs help”. It is a more comforting thought, than the idea that he has a kind of addiction to being antisocial, and is more akin to people who feel compelled to commit burglary, exhibitionism, voyeurism, stalking, attacking strangers… He enjoys duping and controlling people, violating boundaries for goodness’ sake. If people perpetrate burglaries every night, or hide in bushes to hiss obscenities at teenaged girls while masturbating, people don’t say “They are clearly mentally ill and need help”, they say these people need to be stopped and the public needs protecting.

To add, an epileptic or neurological seizure presents very differently to a psychogenic seizure, although to a lay person with no medical background they may appear the same. This man was faking an epileptic seizure. Someone having a psychogenic seizure would present differently and this would have been very clear to the paramedics.

I’m by no means an expert in mental health but have known a few cases like this and the term they used was that it wasn’t mh related but “behavioural” as in the person had spent significant time being assessed by mh professionals and wasn’t diagnosed with relevant conditions, had capacity and had support and coping strategies put in place and they were still carrying out the actions and had wasted considerable time and resources already hence the order being granted. You have to evidence the impact the person has had on services to get one. Obviously the person is getting something from it and it’s probably to do with enjoying feeling cared for for that period of time but a better solution is needed as front line staff are often tied up inappropriately. It’s one for the right care, right person approach.

Many of these behaviours would have underlying mental causes.

Indeed, but if someone started a thread feeling upset because they’d been burgled and their bed had been urinated on and their stairs defecated on (these things I know have happened in a burglary), everyone on the thread would rally around them and condemn the antisocial, immoral activity. If anyone posted in response “They are clearly unwell and answering some need in themselves”, the poster would be given very short shrift. You could argue that any antisocial and/or law-breaking activity has mental causes.

My DS has epilepsy and we happen across medical professionals who come out with this shite. It's harmful and not all epileptic seizures are typical. My biggest fear around his epilepsy (apart from SUDEP) is the treatment he may recieve if he ends up in A&E after we had one bad experience.
PNES are also not fake seizures, the sufferer has no control over them and its not a diagnosis you want as medical professionals can be awful. The man in the OP's just sprang back to life when questioned, this is not PNES.
A friend's daughter had her epilepsy drugs removed as her seizures didn't look "typical", she ended up very poorly after a massive epileptic seizure. There are reports of people dying after being not believed (typically young women).

I'm sorry, but I'm not clear from your post whether you are conflating psychogenic seizures with faking seizures? Which really isn't correct. It is also not uncommon to have both epileptic and psychogenic seizures.

I said to DH that whatever his needs are - they aren’t being met. I don’t know the answer or why. Or what society can do. But I feel very out of sorts

You did what you felt was right at the time and that was all you could do.

Let's face it, what you experienced was clearly a very unique situation with someone having extremely complex MH needs. No societal system out there can ever be set up and funded to meet the needs of that person. That's life.

All people saying how sad this is and how he must have unmet needs - do you feel this way about other criminals?

This person is a fraud and is deliberately acting in a way to take away scare resources from those who need them.

Maybe keep your sympathy for the old lady with a broken hip who waited longer for an emergency ambulance because of him or the parents of a child with their first febrile seizure who were terrified whilst waiting for an ambulance.

I think the problem is that people see this kind of individual as either 'mad' or 'bad'. If people can't prove he has a diagnosable mental health condition, then they assume he's just 'bad'.

Personally, I believe anyone who would do this, is in need of support. They may or may not have a diagnosed mental health condition. But their behaviour is a reaction to something - likely past trauma. To those who say "he may be getting a kick out of it - he's just a wrongun" - well in that case he needs support to understand why he would want to get his kicks that way, what is his life missing? What trauma has he experienced to make him behave this way for kicks?

It's hardly the life a child dreams of is it? What's gone wrong for this guy and how can we help him so he doesn't keep repeating these behaviours?

If he's aggressive with the paramedics - then we need to understand why otherwise he will.keep.doing it. If it's because they call him a faker and a time waster, then I suppose we can see why he might be aggressive with them. If they are perfectly pleasant with him, then it's about something else - maybe a bad experience with health care.profeasionals.as a child.or.something. The reasons need to.be established so intervention can be put in place.

We cannot as a society just ignore and criminalise someone like this. It won't work to stop the behaviour - he has a court order and is.still.doing it after all! He really needs.psychological evaluation in my opinion, and then a supportive intervention to address his issues and help him find more appropriate ways of getting his needs met. He sounds lonely and miserable :(

@FollowingSeas read my post again, and my post above. Of course I'm not conflating the two, in fact I made a point to state the opposite.

Yes I do feel that way about other criminals

Having worked in the criminal justice system my whole adult life it is clear to me that people who end up offending and in prison have been failed by multiple authority figures throughout their life, usually starting in infancy.

These are the kids from.care, from child protection plans, who trusted school, whose parents took them out robbing, who were groomed, who didn't learnt to read or write, who were abused, etc... etc

No 6 year old dreams of growing up to be an offender going to prison. If they do things have already gone vastly wrong for them.

*truanted from school (not trusted school!)

With the greatest respect, the court order will have been a last resort. This person will have had extensive support from multidisciplinary teams before getting to this stage. It is very rare for things to have escalated to point of criminalising the behaviour! There comes a point when this person's behaviour is having such an impact on the ability to effectively provide an area with emergency resources that it must be tackled from all angles.

@HalloweenYey Do you think that these lives can be turned around though after so much damage or are we throwing endless resources at something that will not change.

I think beyond a fairly young age the ability to change ingrained behaviours and rehabilitate people is beyond our societies resources.

What we need to be doing is helping families from even before conception and throughout early childhood.

I don't believe that the amount of help available (and there is a definite limit of resources available) will improve things for this individual and that they will continue causing harm to other people.

I don't doubt that, I have worked with someone on a court order for repeatedly calling a&e, crisis services and others.

However, this person's care was often shipped.from.team.to.team. noone wanted them and they were never given lengthy, 1:1, psychological intervention or offered a full assessment from a psychologist to establish a formulation and make working, useful, recommendations.

Yes, there were lots of meetings between professionals about this person, which led nowhere.

There were different care coordinators put in charge who were out of their depth, the client went to hospital for a week here and there, was often under crisis services.

Unfortunately what these people need is often not given for two reasons:

1. It's expensive. Most services are based on quick fix, cheap interventions ... (An antidepressant or 6 sessions of CBT won't help with a problem this big).

1. People are reluctant tooffer because they usually don't like the client and professionals often hate talking about them, speaking to them, showing any compassion so the client doesn't get what they actually need and continue to prove to professionals how 'bad' they are which reinforces professionals lack of compassion which compounds the problem.

Sorry this was in response to@jasmine465

I forgot to quote

I'm glad it wasn't your intention, but I read it several times before posting and still wasn't clear.

This is how I think also. There are some people who are just not able to 'find a fit' in society for whatever reason and if it's not a recognised medical condition that they exhibit, there really isn't much or even anything available at all for them.

That is sad; they are still people and still deserving of care. But there is none to be had with services being withdrawn and care in the community so underfunded.

OP, you did the right thing. This man could just as easily have been somebody in need of medical help which you and your family helped get, very quickly. Your husband shouldn't feel like a mug either, just because other people know this person and don't act or can't be bothered, doing the right thing is never wrong.

As PP said, discombobulated is just the word for how you're feeling; it will pass. Your brain will rationalise and set it aside. Good for you and your family for helping; never feel badly for acts of compassion.

I sort of agree. We have limited funds as a society and infra Ned patterns are hard to change.

However, I feel that society has a responsibility to care for everyone. Especially those who were completely failed as children.

I often think of some of the children abused by their parents who died of the injuries inflicted (baby P for example, and countless others). How would they have turned out if they had survived the abuse? and the abuse continued undetected or not helped by social services. Not too well I'm sure. In prison maybe, on the sex offender register maybe, with severe.mental.health problems maybe

Society has a lot of empathy and compassion for abused and neglected children. But when those children grow up the empathy turns to hate for the behaviour they demonstrate.

Some children are never taught.compassion, only aggression and hate.

Some children aren't taught sexual.boundaries, respect, love, only abuse and inappropriate sexual contact, and love through sexual aggression

Some children are not given or shown love, only hate, hurt, criticism, abuse

We are sadly products of our environment. We cannot turn into well rounded adults if we have never been shown how to become that,and had no protective factors to enable it.