Advice: dealing with crazy people?

[UGAalum94]

This kind of a non-specific vent/ request for advice.

How do you deal with the people that you have to work with but who you have come to believe are actually crazy?

I'm not talking about anyone who you can choose to ignore or quit interacting with with a little bit of effort.

I'm also not talking about people who are certifiably insane or demented and who no one else will expect you to do anything other humor or ignore, depending on your relationship to them. And I'm not talking cases where you are professionally expected to deal directly with the person's nuttiness, for instance like if your work in a group home or teach the emotionally disordered.

I'm talking about people, like the parents of kids that you might teach if you were a teacher, whom you are professionally obligated to deal with over whom you have no expectation of control who, experience has taught, you are nuts.

tips? suggestions?

I find myself wanting to formalize and document all my interactions with one such person, but I'm realizing that I'm just creating more occasions when I end up having to deal with the nuttiness. But the parent's weirdness affects the kid's attendance and school work, so I don't really know what to do.

There are a few ways that I think I could make the problem go away, but they seem unprofessional, like either not holding the kid responsible for deadlines or conversely, just quietly giving the kid zeros when her time ran out and she hadn't taken care of things. (This is a high school kid and she really could be taking more responsibility for her own work. I don't want to penalize her for her mom's issues, but I don't want to reward her or enable her either.) But my school is all about communication and documentation, so I keep dealing with a mom who can't seem to remember what she's said from one interaction to the next and sends entirely mixed messages about her involvement in the kid's education, in a way that suggests maybe a certain detachment from reality.

Anyone?