“My partner doesn’t want me to come back home now that I’ve come to the hospital. He is worried I’ll come back and infect him and his parents. I have nowhere to go”. Fear and guilt were palpable in the young woman sitting before me. She had decided to follow the recommendation of the psychiatric crisis response team and come to the Emergency Room for worsening thoughts of suicide.
This dilemma …
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We bear the pain in different ways. For me, it feels like you’re a combat medic and you’ve used up all your tourniquets on a wounded soldier that seems to hemorrhaging from everywhere. The blood seeps through the skin, and no matter what you do you cannot stop the soldier from choking to death on their own blood, even as your hands, arms, and legs are applying pressure wherever they …
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Just like so many teenagers out there, I found myself hooked on the Netflix show 13 Reasons Why from the first episode. The only difference is that I am not a teenager, but a physician practicing child and adolescent psychiatry and managing inpatient child and adolescent psychiatric units for the last nine years. I was surprised to see the number of emergency room evaluations of my admitted patients indicating that …
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