You all know by now what I do for a living. I go into hospitals and assess people who are in psychiatric crisis. As it would happen, "psychiatric crisis" for the vast majority of people I see means "suicidal." Nothing I do (except maybe the form) is rote, because people are different and no one ever presents to me with exactly the same set of circumstances as someone else I evaluated. It's what makes the job challenging and interesting.
Ironically, however, I think the absolute worst suicide story I've heard to date came to me via my personal life and not my professional life.
Fair warning to my faithful: This entry is graphic and if you feel details that I'm going to offer here (because I can) are going to offend you or gross you out in any way, now is the time to sign off.
So Face Crack. It's sucking my life away. I'm hoping the crush will ebb and I can get back to my regularly scheduled existence soon, but for now I'm bewitched with the site for numerous reasons.
Like chatting.
Some of you might find this hard to believe, but I'm a chatty girl.
And if an old high school pal wants to chat me up, then I'm going to chat right back. The hazard here is that inevitably the question "So. What do you do?" comes up and then I have to tell them (although, after this recent chat, I might just start telling people I study mushrooms for a living).
A girl that I knew way-back-when initiated a chat a couple of times last week and when she found out what I did, she asked me if I had heard about a guy whom attended our school that had tried to kill himself. As a caveat, I graduated from a small, Catholic high school, so it was not unusual for any given student to be at least acquainted with half the student body. I knew who the guy was even though he was a couple of years behind me, and I had heard about his attempt.
What I didn't know were the details. She knows about them because her best friend was engaged to the guy when this whole event went down. She was at the hospital within hours.
Last chance to bail....
What an absolutely ghastly situation. Mental illness runs in this man's family and at one point his sister was hospitalized. Apparently he had experienced some pretty significant psychiatric symptoms for years, including hallucinations. I have no idea if he was ever on medication for the voices, which by report were mean and homicidal in nature. He had even tried to kill himself once before, but a friend stopped him before he could follow through with it.
The day of his attempt was a quiet Sunday morning. Fiancee was in another room futzing around when she heard a gun shot. She ran into their bedroom and there lay (lie?) her man with half his face blown off--pieces of it on the ceiling. He had put a shotgun under his chin. You can just imagine the mess. She freaked, who wouldn't?, and ran to call 911. As she went back into their room, he was propping himself up on his elbows and trying to talk to her. The operator told her to roll him to his left side.
When the police arrived, they put her in a squad car and questioned her for four hours before they would let her go to the hospital. An understandable maneuver when you're looking at it objectively: they needed to rule out homicide. But my God, what an ordeal for her, being traumatized first by the event and then by being treated like a suspect.
Fast forward two years. They are no longer together. She was on Xanax for a year following and remains in therapy to this day. He, unbelievably, is still alive. No jaw, no nose, no sight, no brain damage. I don't know what he's doing now...perhaps living with his parents.
It was like a train wreck, this chat. And it's been with me daily since then. I just cannot imagine witnessing an event like this (my cousin was home last year when my uncle by marriage blew his brains out--so this is the second time in six months for a story of this nature to hit me personally) and I certainly couldn't imagine surviving it.
Look around you today. Notice the positive things in your life. Be thankful for your family, your friends, your pets, your talents, your place in the world. Give a person you love a hug. Smile at a stranger. Notice the beauty in your life. Know that your life is good. That people are good. It's spring and the flowers are beginning to bloom. ->
Read the complete post at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tXCM/~3/DVw8y44J_F0/im-purging-its-monday-im-allowed.html
Posted
20 Apr 2009 2:19 PM
by
Trench Warfare
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