Suicide Is Never The Answer

It was a quiet sunny Sunday morning, with a full roster of patients, when the charge nurse on the adult ward, told me that one of the patients was missing, and that had left  a suicide note.  Fearing the worse, I reporting her missing to  the police and immediately ordered the locking down of the whole hospital.

At the beginning of my career, I supervised part time  on weekends, and though I had seen this happened several times before, it had never occurred when I was totally in charge.  The protocol was to begin a systematic search of every nook and cranny of the hospital.

Instead of starting with the public areas of the hospital, I intuitively felt drawn towards checking the floor where the library,dictating and occupational and leisure therapy rooms were located. It was generally quiet and devoid of any people on the weekends,but nevertheless accessible to patients.

Instead of starting at point A and going on to point B, my first gut feeling was to check the public bathrooms. Reasoning that if she hadn’t left the hospital, this would be where she would go to escape scrutiny to harm herself.

The door of the first one checked was indeed locked.  After calling out her name and getting no answer, the fear of what I might find behind the door flooded my mind.

I remember well, seeing her bluish white face laying in a pool of her blood that now filled the whole bathroom floor.  Floating in the toilet was her opened Bible, as a last testament to her  hopelessness that pushed her to end her life.

I quickly put my ear to her pale parted lips to check for breathing and palpated her neck for a pulse, neither of which could be felt.  Multiple slash wounds to her inner elbow and wrist veins were only now barely oozing blood, since her blood pressure was so low.

Her lips felt cool as I forced my breath into her lungs, then proceeded to pump her sternum with all the weight I could muster.  I had practiced this countless times on plastic dummies, but never before on a real human being.

In light of all the obvious blood loss, I was hoping that her pulse was too faint to feel, so I kept rhythmically pumping her chest and breathing whatever air and hope I could into her lifeless body.  Suddenly there was a flicker of one eyelid and the sound of a short attempt to suck in some air.

Unable to call for help, without leaving her, I wanted a few minutes to assure she was indeed able to breathe.  Rushing against time, I found a phone to call for emergency help, which arrived in minutes.

Some of us have had times in our lives where we felt so broken by life that each day , became a painful ordeal.  Losses, disappointments, rejection, abandonment, betrayals, and the list goes on of all the wounding humans suffer in living this life.

The heart can take only so much, before it seems to tear into a million irretrievable pieces, that we haven’t a clue and sometimes not even the desire to restore back in place. In those times, life becomes meaningless and without any substance that holds us here.

Wanting out of the pain becomes an obsession, an incessant desire to end it all.  Many have come to the brink of falling into this dark oblivion, a path once taken, that has no recourse.

When you are at the end of your rope, and only the deepening shadows of darkness surrounds you, you are totally unable to see any light at all at the end of the tunnel. You can even resent those foolish fools who still value life, who in your mind  feed you their  optimistic “garbage.”

For patients, convinced that suicide is the only option, wanting to die consumes them like a wind-blown fire.   Some can even take on a fake cheerful demeanour before a suicide attempt.

For me, this is when I become the most fearful for them and lose the most sleep.  How do I try to save them with mere words, and my choicest heartfelt concerns?  My fight isn’t only for them, but for those they would leave behind, sentenced forever to suffer too.

Every therapist has to confront the inevitable truth, and that is that none of us, however talented we might be, can save anyone.  However one invests in saving the life of a patient, the ultimate overriding decision comes from the patient.

We can only hope to influence them enough by whatever we can do, and say, to avoid any fatal decisions.  But even at our very best, we are never fully the determining factor.                                                                                                                                                      In the end, we are wounded healers,  who call out to the depths of their sufferings souls, pleading in any way we can to save them from the ultimate fate of death by their own hands.

I do let them know that suicide is the most selfish and cruel act to afflict on those they will be leaving behind.  However gentle by nature I am, this is a time when I do not mince words and become authoritatively intervening.

I flood them with the dirty unescapable truths of suicide.  They may think that they will escape the pain they so desperately want to leave behind, but only their body will die, not their consciousness ,nor their soul, and especially not their pain, which will follow them.

Their children and or families will suffer untold quilt and pain, and sheer cold abandonment that will never be healed.  Sadly, children of suicide victims, are more apt to choose suicide themselves ,when life in turn get rough for them.

For those who do survive the darkness that pervades them, it is a mysterious act of Grace.   Yet, even the aftermath of surviving seems an impossible task.

Picking up the pieces after a suicidal gesture or attempt is treading on uncharted waters for any who was so determined to leave this life.  Some are angry that they were deprived of their well laid out plans to kill themselves, and others are reluctantly grateful to see another day.

When I visited the woman mentioned in my story, it was a sweet reward to hug her now warm shoulders.   She thanked me for her rescue, saying she now knew how much she was loved and needed.

Situationnally precipitated suicides such as devastating losses of relationship, or jobs for example; putting back the shattered pieces of their lives seems at times an impossible task, not only for the patient but for the most altruistic therapist. Reorienting their vision of themselves in relation to their loss is difficult, but something we all have to do sometime in our lifetime.

For those whose suicidal gestures and attempts  followed a severe  breakthrough depression, in the case of bipolar patients, it is a matter of changing medicines or mood stabilizers and following them more closely to maintain stability.

I remember one patient was only able to give up turning to suicide, after her last and most serious attempt was jumping off a very high bridge.  She recounted feeling a presence or force that buffeted her fall, resulting in her miraculously hitting the water with little injuries, that kept her afloat to be rescued.

Life changes, and what was a very painful loss of a relationship, or job can lead to newer and even better opportunities to fulfil one’s dreams.  Resiliency is the key and of course patience to cross over the stormy seas of life to a tranquil and peaceful shore.

I have witnessed incredible changes of events for those, whose lives were on the brink of a needless death, but took the courage to stick life out, despite their pain.  Human life,  resorts to the same forces of homeostasis that one finds in nature to restore what was loss.

Survivors will certainly grow stronger, and with hard work on themselves, can go beyond that which threatened to end their lives.  In the scope of their recovery, they realise that suicide was never the answer, but living through the pain is what leads them to the  path of strength, insight, and  healing.