Posts Tagged "suicide"
I feel your pain: Suicide’s impact on the mental health professional
As a mental health professional, two experiences with suicide have stayed with me over time.
The first occurred while working on an inpatient unit. A young woman jumped five stories from a parking garage and survived.
Remembering Daniel: A story told is a story never forgotten
He was one of the most honest people I had ever met. His face was honest; it betrayed every emotion. His voice was honest. He always told you exactly what he was thinking. His heart was honest.
He felt things more strongly than anyone I know. I loved him. I met him on the first day of 9th grade and was instantly smitten. He was always kind and jovial with me, despite my relatively uncool standing, to his relatively popular one.
‘Did you hear about Frank?’
As I showed a hometown friend around my university’s library one November Sunday afternoon in my sophomore year, a classmate saw me and said, “Did you hear about Frank?”.
I had last seen my roommate on Friday afternoon when we both headed to our respective hometowns for the weekend. I returned to the campus on Sunday. Frank did not. He had died by suicide.
Suicide’s common tale: ‘If only I had spoken with him’
I first met “Ted” when I was barely 18, both of us transients in a city of transients where superficial friendships were the common social norm.
Ted was about 10 years older, and although we never dated, we had maintained casual contact with each other. We never discussed our personal history or hopes for the future, but I had sensed a deep, quiet loneliness about him that meshed with my own.
The Unexpected: Part of the Awesome Beacon Bike Ride
Being a part of the Awesome Beacon Bike Ride has been an incredible privilege, filled with many unexpected gifts.
I have lived in Florida for 17 years, but it was only when planning our routes and then actually pedaling down the road, that I discovered a treasure of scenic towns, spectacular views and parts of the state I did not know or appreciate.
Zero Suicide: Aspirational or Reality?
It turns out that almost everything I was taught about suicide during my clinical training is not true.
Contrary to what most clinicians are taught, there is clinical protocol we can follow to prevent suicide attempts – apart from locking people up. Very little of this new knowledge about detecting and treating suicidality has translated into practice.
Guns, Violence, and Suicide
Today’s culture has embraced an erroneous connection between mental illness and violence, partly due to exaggeration by the media, especially in light of the many mass killings in the past several years. The Sept. 1 post on Beacons Lens that appeared after the on-air shooting in Virginia addressed this very point, stating, “[t]he proliferation of today’s media makes it too easy to draw conclusions that aren’t necessarily based in the evidence, often blurring the line between fact and fiction, a view supported by research.” There is, however, an important caveat to this mix of stereotypes and prejudices: the problem of suicide. The 20th century French writer and philosopher, Albert Camus, asserted that suicide is the one truly serious philosophical problem….