I wrote this poem following the suicide of a friend’s parent who they had just visited while they were flying home. This sad and tragic situation moved me to reflect on both my personal experiences with suicide within our family and friends and on my patients who were considering suicide.
Suicide and its attempts are preventable. It is my professional opinion that without exception, it is an act that the individual themselves and all that know them regret. All feel that they would have wanted to live.
My lifelong career as a clinical psychiatrist no doubt stems in part from my birth father dying by his own hand when I was a year old. I was a “why” child innately curious about all things. This led me to science, biology and understanding why things happen and a focus on human psychology. Friends said I had decided to be a psychiatrist in my late teens. As an honor medical student, I considered other specialties, but felt the subspecialty of psychiatry was the only place where the focus was entirely on the person, their life story, psychology, and behavior.
I am no stranger to suicide: my father, grandmother, aunt, cousin, brother, several patients, relatives of friends, and a medical student friend who went into psychiatry and became paranoid schizophrenic all ended their lives. I had fleeting thoughts of my own death during a wrongful death suit (by suicide) of a patient I saw once. The jury took 30 minutes to find me not guilty, but it was probably the most stressful experience of my life.
In my analysis of the circumstances of these losses there are always circumstances and causes for needless deaths. There are personal, situational, psychological and stress factors, coupled with a deep feeling of hopelessness, and social disconnection. Often there are prior periods of depression, vulnerability, and not seeking the mental health services that would have been their salvation.
The single most important factor that would have prevented their deaths would have been the intervention by someone who was sensitive to their plight and acted to secure help. Knowledge of prior periods of demoralization, depression, current stress, and social withdrawal can raise concern and lead to inquiry and supportive intervention for the loved one. This reminds me of my mother sending a chaplain to me after I flunked my first major exam at university. No doubt her familiarity with suicide raised her concern. None who have acted suicidally would wish to have died. Mental health services and medications are lifesaving.
The poem I wrote reflects the complexity, the loss, the grief, and the residual effects of the loss of a loved one. It can be supportively shared with individuals who have been suicidal. It can also help those who have not experienced such a loss since it embodies the deep aftermath of the loss. The poem can help others to understand and to have a heightened sensitivity when people are distressed, and the loss of a life is a possibility. Permission is granted to circulate and publish everything without restriction. Thank you.
No Stranger to Suicide
No stranger to suicide
Again
A gaping hole
So sad
So wrenching
So final
Unthinkable
Such loss
Wounds that can never heal
Heartache that is forever
Questions, doubts, regrets
Why
Cutting short Nature’s clock
Everyone is a casualty
Survivors bereft
The salve of human caring
Only dulls the pain.
Richard Templeton, M.D.
Psychiatrist
Annapolis, Maryland
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
