NOT limited to DU: On ANY message board, why would you put someone on ignore?

[merrily]

151. The more obviously emotionally disturbed are, well, disturbing.

However, I know of no way to help them anyway.

I was once babysitting--for a psychiatrist, btw--whose mother in law was in the home with the kids. He told me she was not well, but he had given her enough medication for horse and she would be asleep soon. A saner, less gullible twenty year old would have left on the spot. Didn't even leave me an emergency number to call and I forgot to ask for one.

Yep, you guessed it. The mother in law never went to sleep. Acted out all night. The youngest of the three kids eventually fell asleep. The other two did not. I was too busy never taking my eyes off the mother in law and trying to make everything seem normal and under my control to get any of the kids bathed and in bed.

When he and his wife got home from their party at around 4:30 am, I was as exhausted and wrung out as any 20 year old can be. However, he took me to the ER with him and her to get her admitted, so I could describe the mother in law's behavior to the admitting doc. He told me that it was a miracle that I, too, was not in a psychotic break because that is what happens to people, even professionals, who spend many hours with someone who is in a psychotic break. That came as close to telling me that "crazy is contagious" as anyone has ever come--and he being the admitting doc for people in the midst psychotic breaks. And insulating oneself from potentially contagious craziness may be the best reason to use ignore.

Now that I look back on it, I don't think I even got paid for that night! Fsck that pyschiatrist and his wife twice. The mother in law (who never did try to hurt herself or any of us, just behaved bizarrely) was apparently the best adult in that family.