Suicide

I am on my Psychiatry rotation so we always have to ask our patients if they have thoughts of harming themselves. One of my patients said yes today. A friend was just telling me that she was devastated when one of her co-fellows took his own life last year after getting kicked out of their program. She was asking herself whether she would have missed the signs if he was her own patient. It is easy to imagine that when we ourselves are just trying to survive the demands of our professional and personal life, it becomes very difficult to notice when someone is desperately in need of our help. Yesterday, the mother of a former medical student here spoke to us and shared the story of her son who committed suicide when he was a third-year. He was just like us in many ways. At the AA meeting that I attended last night, there was an announcement that one of their own took his life over the weekend. The sadness in the room was palpable. There were probably a number of them asking if they could have done something for him.

The beginning of Canto XIII of Dante's Inferno goes:

The leaves not green, earth-hued;
The boughs not smooth,
knotted and crooked-forked;
No fruit, but poisoned thorns.