Twenty years in a major hospital's ER.As you'll surely know ERs attract many,many females nurses as well as disproportionate number of male nurses.A much larger percentage of the male nurses I interacted with were pathological than was true of the females.I only knew of one nurse who was into scheduled substances.He was caught,given a chance at rehab and reinstatement (with restrictions and monitoring) and,when I left,he was about 1.5 years "clean" and counting. I liked "Mike"...he was a decent guy.And for the record I interacted with at least two other decent,respectable,"normal" male nurses...one of whom was an NP.
Pathological is a vague term....there are striking ways males tend to exhibit pathological behavior verses female. Passive aggression is what one runs into the most from the females.
Most male nurses I work with are married and stable, 10 per cent are single and straight...10 per cent are gay. 50 per cent of the females I work with are divorced with issues(drinking, drugs, multiple affairs). About 15 per cent are lesbian and loudly proclaim it! The other 35 per cent are mostly married and stable (or single, stable and are or soon to be engaged). This is typical of the ICU environments I have worked in over the years.
I’m considered an anachronism...a conservative male RN who doesn’t drink, smoke, disagrees with pot legalization, seldom uses profanity and doesn’t hit on any woman. Many women kind of laugh(not unkindly) at me when I come around the corner and they are speaking about an off color subject and I give them a kind of “oh boy, oh brother look” and turn the other way...yet they respect the fact I don’t try to get into any other woman’s shorts. I’ve been married 25 years and they know it and they sometimes make mention of the ring I wear on my finger as in “I get upset when my husband won’t wear his wedding band, he makes all kinds of excuses not to”.
Read the accounts of Jezebel and King Ahab...in the old testament. It is a great psychological primer as to the psychologies I deal with amidst the male, female RN mixes I am familiar with.