(Trigger warning: suicide attempt)
It was dinner time at this hospital’s psychiatric unit. They shuffled into the dining area—slippers, pajamas, disheveled, sad, lonely, depressed … and forgotten.
Head count. All were present except for one: Rita. Faithful Rita. Always at every therapy session, including poetry therapy, art therapy, and bingo night. Always smiling and laughing, cheering up the other patients. Rita was 54 years old and a mother of three. Her husband had left her years ago for that younger woman … that “pretty thing.” Thirty-two years of marriage—gone.
Once a lively woman, she became despondent. She wouldn’t shower, cook, do the dishes, or comb her hair. Everything in her life came to a brutal stop. Her doctor admitted her to the hospital, her first time ever in a psychiatric unit.
How embarrassing, she thought. No one could find out, so she tried to make the most of it. She joined every therapy session offered. For a split second, she felt a new lease on life and made the most of it.
She encountered sad people and catatonic, neurotic, and psychotic patients. All walks of life—teachers, lawyers, professors, accountants, physicians, nurses, housewives, businessmen, and bankers—all carrying their own package of troubles.
But this day was different. Rita didn’t laugh. She wasn’t lively. She wouldn’t eat her breakfast or lunch, and she stayed in her room, isolated and secluded.
For dinner, she wasn’t at her normal seat in the dining room. She was missing. The psychiatric nurses and technicians searched her room and bathroom. She was nowhere in sight. The unsettled quiet grew to panic in this distraught unit. Every crevice, corner, room, and bathroom was searched.
A visitor bathroom on the unit was shut and locked. We pushed and banged on the bathroom door. Security called stat. They were able to unlock the door. It was frightful to see what was behind that door.
And there she was—Rita—staring at herself in the bathroom mirror, whimpering. Blood trickled down her neck. She wept and said, “I just couldn’t do it.”
She had hidden a razor blade inside her suitcase, missed upon admittance to the unit—a deadly oversight.
Rita had exposed her jugular vein. She sliced through her neck to reveal her protruding jugular vein, this major blood vessel bulging out, pulsating, and waiting for that final slice—a cut away from life and death.
We were all paralyzed with shock. How could someone be so sad, so depressed, so lonely to make that final cut? The RRT (rapid response team) was called, and she was emergently transferred to surgery.
It was a long rehabilitation, a cloud looming over her head. But with ongoing therapy, Rita was able to breathe new life into herself.
That child being bullied because she’s overweight, that college kid being made fun of because he comes from a low-income family, that nurse who didn’t have all the answers and was shunned by her fellow team, that MD belittling the nurse for interrupting for an urgent situation, that homeless person searching for food and shelter, that partner gaslighting.
That growing list of people being cruel to others—the results are not good. The results can be final.
Think about what you say and do. Reach out and give a helping hand because the life you save may one day be your own.
Debbie Moore-Black is a nurse who blogs at Do Not Resuscitate.
