Positive Psychiatry & Breaking The Silence After Loss of a Patient to Suicide

In this country, in the next 60 seconds, a mental health professional is going to open a chart.

Their hands might be steady, their coffee might still be warm.

And then they're going to read a message or take a phone call or get a knock on the office door.

And the whole world is going to tilt on its axis.

because the person they have been treating, their patient, the person they have been rooting for quietly, fiercely, sometimes for months or even years, that person has died by suicide.

So if you're a clinician listening to this right now, I want you to sit for a minute with what I just said, because statistically that has already happened to you, or it likely will.

Welcome back, dear friends, to Positive Psychiatry.

I'm Rakesh Jain, and today we're going to walk into a room that most of medicine still tries very hard not to enter.

We're going to talk about what happens to us, to the healers, when we lose a patient to suicide.

Not the patient's story alone, though we will honor that every day in us, but Today in this podcast, Positive Psychiatry Podcast, we will focus on the second story, the story that almost never gets told, the clinician's story.

And I promise you this, by the time we're done today, this conversation will not leave us in the dark.

It's going to actually lead us to light.

That's the whole architecture of what I want to build with you today in the next few minutes, because that's exactly the arc the humanity of taking care of people takes us.

I want to tell you where this episode comes from.

So at PsyCongress, alongside a colleague, Dr. Jill Harkavy-Friedman, who is the Senior Vice President of Research at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

We talk about clinicians when a patient is lost to suicide.

Our talk is titled, Out of the Darkness, Walking in Unity After Patient Loss.

And what struck me, even after decades in this field, is how hungry, how hungry we all are in this giant room of ours.

Psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, PAs, psychologists, residents, you name it.

All of us leaning in, all of us quietly, gently wiping our tears.

Because nearly every one of us has a story.

And most of us have never had a forum to discuss it.

Well, that ends today.

This is our forum.