Are Nursing and Other “Caring” Professions a “Sink for Pathological Personalities”?
Nurse Ratched Versus Florence Nightingale: Nursing is not a “sink for pathological personalities,” although violence perpetrated by nurses and other medics is especially disturbing.
A controversial post on X has caused a storm of heated debates. The post claims that the nursing profession, which used to attract highly compassionate and caring people in the noble tradition of Christian nuns or legendary figures like Florence Nightingale, has turned into a “sink for pathological personalities.” The post continues:
The number of borderline and narcissistic and sociopathic nurses today is noticeable…. Pathological personalities, especially female, are attracted to “caring” professions. Why?
- Automatic public trust. Those of you “shocked” by what I’m saying are doing exactly what they want you to. They’re trading on an outdated image.
- Social camouflage to hide their wicked behavior and to make any criticism of them look “unhinged.”
- The ability to control others, especially life and death.
Same reason you see so many insane sociopathic teachers and social workers.
You should preferentially distrust nurses. I know that sounds shocking because you're still working on the old image of a profession of caring women.
That's not been true for a long time.
Nursing is a sink for pathological personalities. The number of borderline and…
— Disaffected (@DisaffectedPod) January 27, 2026
Such comments are partly a reaction to shocking recent incidents of violent conduct by nurses. It suffices to mention the Florida labor and delivery nurse who publicly wished severe childbirth injuries to Karoline Leavitt or the Virginia Commonwealth University nurse who advocated for attacking federal officers with toxic substances and tampering with the drinks of ICE agents. A major nursing union, the Oregon Association of Nurses, has reportedly promoted training sessions to resist ICE and Customs and Border Patrol agents.
Such incidents are disturbing, to put it mildly, and need to be properly addressed. It is scary to entrust one’s life to individuals who openly encourage violence when they have a sacrosanct obligation to “do no harm” and offer the same standard of care to anyone regardless of convictions. Wishing physical harm on political opponents signifies a drastic deterioration of values since the 1980s, when the surgeon treating President Reagan after the latter’s assassination attempt famously stated: “Today, Mr. President, we are all Republicans.”
Radical ideology and violent media rhetoric have turned numerous Western women into unrestrained social activists who hate men as a gender and wish ill on those they disagree with. Aggressive conduct against political opponents, however, is not an exclusively female problem, as some men have posted violent content and engaged in physical aggression, including assassination attempts and murder.
The extreme stress associated with the medical profession can intensify criminal tendencies in individuals without strong values. Greed, corruption, and moral relativism are additional factors that may lead to criminal behavior, such as abusing terminally ill or elderly patients, harvesting organs from living people, and, arguably, transgender procedures.
Yet I do not concur with various aspects of the above X post.
I disagree with any generalization that a large proportion of nurses, teachers, or social workers are pathological personalities. Modern thinkers often blame personality disorders for bad behavior. I find psychology fascinating in many ways, as I consider human nature most intriguing. Yet psychology is not of the same immutable rigor as the hard science of, say, physics or mathematics.
Psychology helps explain behavioral patterns. Personality disorders are commonly categorized as: Cluster A (odd/eccentric): Paranoid, Schizoid, and Schizotypal; Cluster B (dramatic/emotional): Antisocial, Borderline, Histrionic, and Narcissistic; and Cluster C (anxious/fearful): Avoidant, Dependent, and Obsessive-Compulsive.
However, it may also be harmful to rationalize problematic conduct in terms of such clusters and categories, as this provides a degree of medical legitimacy to what has been historically known as “bad behavior.” Thus, instead of striving to improve one’s nature, individuals might accept their diagnoses as excuses beyond their control. Of course, this does not pertain to serious mental illness, which must be, and has been, medically treated.
The deep historical reasons for violent and even criminal behavior among nurses or social activists go beyond personality disorders. Elements of such disorders may be present, but the root cause is moral erosion that blurs the boundaries of good and evil. It is a destructive ideology that rejects traditional Judeo-Christian values, demonizes Western civilization, and causes people to despair regarding their own lives and the world’s future.
Many of those who advocate political violence are not born with some disorder but become brainwashed by a culture of hatred and complete intolerance toward dissenting opinions. They have been driven to existential fear caused by a pervasive apocalyptic narrative regarding issues like “the patriarchy,” climate change, conservatism, or the Trump movement.
Traditionally, people have aspired to curb the negative aspects of their nature. Human nature has been the same historically and geographically, but certain value systems bring out either the best or the worst in individuals. American ideals, for example, have largely stimulated the best in people, while totalitarian socialism has brought forth the worst.
Systems based on Judeo-Christian ethics and respect for inherent human worth and innate rights have cultivated moral conduct as a social standard. Fearing God, feeling guilt and shame for one’s transgressions, and constantly trying to improve have done wonders for human flourishing. Of course, some people abide by objective moral standards without faith or spirituality, though it is harder to be virtuous based on rational convictions alone. Others are simply good-natured individuals, though good nature is not enough to create and preserve a decent society.
The above controversial post on nursing reminded me of the book and film titled One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the infamous character of Nurse Mildred Ratched. Her persona embodies the worst in people who may be attracted to professions like nursing to indulge their manipulative cruelty.
There have always been villains in literature and the real world, and the recent destructive propaganda that dehumanizes ideological opponents can certainly exacerbate vicious tendencies. Such propaganda and conduct must be routinely exposed and addressed, and violence prevented as much as possible.
But we need not disparage entire professions like nursing or teaching because of disturbing incidents that contradict the essence of such professions. A popular Latin maxim states: Abusus non tollit usum, “Abuse does not take away use,” meaning that the abuse of something does not justify its removal. Cars are used for transportation, but may also cause death. This does not mean that cars are essentially bad and must be avoided.
Nursing is not a “sink for pathological personalities,” although violence perpetrated by nurses and other medics is especially disturbing. The erosion of traditional morality has led to an increase in aggressive and lawless behavior in many areas of life. One solution is to apply even stricter standards when hiring medical professionals and evaluate their compassion and moral values regarding human life. Lawsuits exposing abuse and violence are also effective.
On an institutional level, we must remove radical indoctrination from hospitals, schools, and government entities, which have been infested with destructive political activism. In addition to limiting the influence of pernicious ideologies, we must actively and broadly promote traditional American ideals. In my native language, the term for nurse used to be “compassionate sister,” changed by the communists to “medical nurse.” It is time nursing became again ubiquitously and uncontroversially synonymous with compassion.
Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Reviewing the post I didn’t see any claim about ‘a large proportion’. Instead it was a direct appeal to stop putting nurses, teachers, social workers on a pedestal. The implied appeal is to.do the.same for women who are after all just as morally fallible and just as susceptible to sin as men. Going into every interaction with those who will be responsible for our most vulnerable populations children and the elderly in a cynical, scrutinizing ‘prove yourself and earn the trust’ stance seems pretty reasonable.
There’s probably a lot more caregivers abusing the vulnerable than we’re comfortable admitting. Especially when we expand the scope to include childcare workers, home health aide, nursing home/hospice staff. Children and the elderly are very vulnerable to abuse/exploitation by their caregivers.
One thing that is clear is that there has been a total loss of gravitas from many of those professions. Tik Tok dancing nurses. Taking off your scrubs (work clothes, not constumery) for OnlyFans. If you told me Joe Francis was ramping up a new series called Nurses Gone Wild, I’d take you seriously.
As a retired nurse, it brings such anguish when I see videos by nurses wanting to cause harm to others
I must say I have worked with many great , compassionate nurses, but the hospitalists have been very left, often coming out trans, gay or bisexual.
And yes I worked with trans nurses, be that it may a decade ago. I never saw them be abusive to patients and didn’t get complaints of the same.
But the hospitalist, dear God, the conversations in the nurses station…
I disliked them so, most of them. I preferred private Drs who appreciated an experienced nurse.
The young resident hospitalists had very little respect for the nurses.
In the past Doctors mostly established their own practices and were mostly men. Hospitalists are not willing to be business owners. They want predictable hours and paid vacations.
True, but IMO, incomplete. The issue isn’t so much an unwillingness to be a ‘business owner’ but rather the unwillingness to deal with the insane billing process of the modern health insurance system and the workplace regulations and minutia. Those make running a private Medical practice very unappealing in comparison to ‘Marcus Welby MD’ era.
That is likely true. The ACA had a lot of things in it to make all of that more onerous. This likely militates to larger partnerships and often to becoming part of a hospitals clinic system.
Yep. The over regulation and the Byzantine system of medical billing has created a whole new category of worker to take care of the proper coding to get reimbursed from the various insurers with their differing rates and reasons/justification needed. Add in Cray Cray medical malpractice and the ‘normal’ workplace responsibilities for employers on top.
All this works to drive health care delivery away from small business, private practice to a corporatist dominated environment. Past time to use anti monopoly statutes to break up the monopoly cartels which are often vertically integrated. Your Physician orders X-Ray, labs, other testing from in house or affiliated service providers. You don’t get a real choice b/c the reimbursement is limited by the IN company to ‘network’ providers of services.
Like we saw in Covid mania the US economic system is largely rigged in favor of larger corporate entities. Wall.St concerns outweigh Main St concerns and the corporatists support the rigged system b/c it helps their financial bottom line as do their apologists whose 401K balance depends on Wall St success even if it means financial carnage on Main St.
I completely agree withyour comment. And for many of the reasons you stated, I chose to go with a private practice internal medicine concierge physician, where I pay him an annual fee for essentially on-demand access, and, more importantly, visits are commonly an hour, not the customary 10 minutes approved by insurance companies and Medicare. Everything runs more smoothly and hassle-free: lab testing, imaging, everything. And if I am admitted to the hospital for any reason, he is my attending physician, not a hospitalist here on a work visa who can barely speak English.
In this regard, hospitals and the medical institutions have always been a refuge of tolerance. We always dealt with people who for the most part were at their worst. As a person who would be considered “alarmingly vanilla,” I was always aware that the medical insitutions where I worked would employ those with physical abnormalities at a significantly higher proportion than the general community. I suspect that those individuals would apply to the hospitals because they viewed it, rightly so, as an environment where their abnormalities would not be judged as severly as they would in the general population. What I am referring to here are gross physical abnomalities, almost always congenital.
That being said, what we might be seeing more of now is that those who suffer from “mental” abnomalities are also taking refuge in the medical professions. Unlike those who have a physical impairment, the “mental” cases are choosing to act out from their refuge. And some are discovering that this false sense of empowerment has consequences. We used to joke about the primary requirement for a psychology PhD was to be a bit off of one’s rocker to start with. The danger from attracting those with particular maladies to the health professions is the tendency to transfer that particular identity onto the patient. When “normal” is shifted in one direction, then the bell-curve for normal is also shifted. Imagine getting dietary advice from a morbidly obese nurse? So what we are seeing now is still a fringe element, but it is a fringe from a normal which has been slowly shifting to the left for a long time now.
In other news . . .
Louise Fletcher was awesome in “Star Trek Deep Space Nine”.
Very good! Yes, Louise Fletcher appeared in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-1999) as Winn Adami; An ambitious Bajoran religious leader and the first kai of Bajor elected after the Cardassian Occupation. Take that Kamala Harris!
And she managed to get elected despite being twice the B that Kami is.
Anyone who has spent any time in hospitals, these days, has noticed that some nurses (and not a trivial percentage) are among the most sadistic, evil people on the planet.
Back in 1966 or 1967, I fell on a picket fence and cut my leg open. My mother called the doctor, he told us to meet him at the hospital. I guess it was the ER entrance we used. The doctor and a nurse took me into a room with a table. The doctor put six stitches in my leg. He’d numbed it, but it was still painful, and I talked about the pain until the nurse gave me a hard pinch on my upper arm and asked me whether the needle hurt “my than that?” I kept my mouth closed after that question.
When I saw the picture of Nurse Ratched accompanying the headline I burst out laughing
If there were an Olympic event for psychological torment, Nurse Rachett would take the Gold, without barely raising her voice. She doesn’t need weapons or superpowers, only complete control. Her formula? She serves her patients a cocktail of condensation, manipulation, and subtle cruelty. So is “One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest” a primer for modern-day Democrats?
I nominate Kathy Bates as “Annie Wilkes” in Misery.
Only underpaid, selfless, current and future spinsters should become nurses. And, that’s not sarcasm.
Not true. But a large percentage go on almost immediately to become NP. With minimal skills and experience.
Most do the “online” degrees, get sry little hands on practicing or supervision and there they are dispensing medications with little knowledge of what they are doing.
The Drs “supervising” They don’t even need to be in the same building , get: 30% of the wage.i know drs who literally quit practicing themselves and run several clinics. Banking big bucks .
And red tape, insurance has run many a Dr out to cash only, usually the very wealthy.
The ACA also reduced how many slots there are for training to non-specialist doctors. As you know reducing supply it the best way to reduce the price of something.
The spinsters of the 1950’s are now the lesbian power couples of 2025 politics.
Definitely attracts pill heads (and soon-to-be pill heads)
Thanks a lot. So instead of having think about the possibility that one of a very small number of psychotic nurses may be attending to me in hospital, now I have to worry about a far larger segment, the (brainwashed) radical leftist. I’d rather take my chances with just the psychos.
It’s a form of terrorism. They need to not only lose their jobs and licenses but decades behind bars
“The boomer with the tumor gets the psycho with the hypo?”
This has always been around in the medical profession and first responders. It should get rooted out in school or training, but not always.
The slippery slope started years ago with medical “professionals” providing abortions in the aftermath of Roe v Wade. You don’t get to promote callous disregard for human life at one end of the spectrum without it eventually spilling over into every stage of life.
An additional factor would be the driving out of medical personnel with conscience/conviction due to their resistance to the “covid” vaxx – resulting, I believe, in a greater percentage of bad apples remaining.
The nurses and hospitalists you have to watch out for are mostly on what used to be called the 3 to 11 shift or night shift. It’s easier to get away with non-therapeutic behavior.. Anytime after 10 pm is after visitors have left.
It’s important to have someone watching over your care in any hospital. If someone can stay with you round the clock it is best. Medical errors are bad enought but psycho care providers are even worse.
Just tell your doctor that you sorted everything out on WebMD. They appreciate a vote of condidence right off the bat. 😉 That being said, when I mentioned to my cardiologist that I used to work with Mason Sones, his “A” game was upped to A+
Sadly, most of life has been spent in and out of hospitals or doctors offices either due to my own health or that of family. I am 55 and I have seen every type of place you can imagine. I no longer trust nurses and doctors. I noticed a major shift when the feds started lowering standards which states quickly did also. The people serving us today are in no way competent enough to do the full jobs. My brother was seeking to find out why his leg was swollen and he had some mild chest issues. They said. “Lyme Disease”. Next thing I find out he has had to drive himself to the ER with severe chest pains. Turns out he had a 100% blocked artery to his heart. They never thought at 66 to give him any type of cardiac workup. These were classic heart symptoms being presented even I as a layman could see. Three doctors offices missed it totally. My Mom also had a rectal wall collapse they kept calling a hemorrhoid. The rectal surgery had to be stopped because they did not do all the diagnostics first and they were doing the wrong procedure. My Mom ended up going from Syracuse to Rochester where real colorectal surgeons fixed the mess. I have seen a serious decline in ability of professionals in healthcare to do the job and do it right. And I won’t even start on the cultural issues now arising. Imagine being told I can’t pray to Jesus over my mother in a sedated state because it was offensive to the nurse at the hospital!!!! I threw her out of my Moms room and reported her. She quit her job because she has to be subjected to all forms of worship. Time to clean up the medical profession and also I want to see a dress code again as I really do not need to see people parts hanging out of uniforms.
Leave a Comment