suicide – Go Retire Psychiatrist

Thanks to Dr. H. Steven Moffic for his Psychiatric Times article, “A Psychological Autopsy on My Only Patient Who Died by Suicide.” In it he describes his own experience with a patient who committed suicide. He also reminded us that this is National Suicide Preven t ion Week. It’s also National Suicide Prevention Month.

The quote I’m familiar with about psychiatrists and patients who die by suicide Moffit is by forensic psychiatrist, Robert Simon:

“There are two kinds of psychiatrists—those who have had a patient die by suicide and those who will.”

I have been through that experience. It led me to focus on my role as an educator to psychiatry residents and other trainees to learn as much as I could about the process of suicide risk assessment.

On the other hand, my first experience with someone who died by suicide happened long before I became a psychiatrist. It was in the early 1970s and I was working for a consulting engineer company. I was just a kid, learning on the job to be a drafter and surveyor’s assistant.

One of my teachers was a man I would come to respect a great deal. Lyle was a land survey crew chief and part time photographer. He was gruff, but kind and had a great sense of humor. We all liked him.

He was so tough that, while perched high in a tree and trimming a large branch to enable a line of sight for the instrument man running a theodolite (used to measure vertical and horizontal angles)—he accidentally cut a significant gash in his hand. We on the ground were aghast because blood was dripping from his hand.

He just laughed and said, “I don’t sweat the small stuff.”

One day, he told me and another survey crew member that his girlfriend left him, saying she was tired of picking up after him. He was crying. We felt sorry for him and didn’t know what to say. We never saw him cry before. This image was strikingly different from the tough guy persona he usually had.

As I look back on it, I wondered why he didn’t think the breakup was just more “small stuff.”

The next day, one of the leaders of the company made a short announcement, saying that Lyle had “passed away,” the night before, by suicide. A little later, the rest of the story gradually emerged. Lyle had shot himself in the chest. One of the guys said that it took a long time for him to die, that somebody found him early the next morning, and all Lyle could say was “It hurts.” At first, I thought he meant physical pain. Later, I wondered if he meant physical and emotional pain.

About a week later, one of the survey crew members was planning to pick me up and drive us to Lyle’s funeral. He never showed up.

Of course, I could not have foreseen Lyle’s suicide based on his being so upset about a breakup with his girlfriend. I was just a kid.

When I became a psychiatrist, I saw this quite a lot. I learned, a few times the hard way, how to make the best judgments I could about what might happen to a patient describing physical and emotional pain.

I updated my suicide risk assessment presentation today in light of new data on suicide risk assessment stratification. It turns out that using such tools might not be supported by the research evidence. That’s not going to stop the use of such tools, which include the Columbia–Suicide Severity Rating Scale, which is in wide use.

I found criticism of these scales in a recently published article in Clinical Psychiatry News, published June 21, 2019, “Why we need another article on suicide contracts,” by Nicholas Badre, MD and Sanjay S. Rao, MD.

For many years now, psychiatrists and other health care professionals have learned that trying to use no-suicide or no-self harm contracts are controversial and don’t prevent suicide. Badre and Rao sound like they’re easing away from that contention although they still say that a thorough clinical suicide risk assessment ought to be done.

Until I saw this article, I was not aware of a recent review of 70 studies showed that: “no individual predictive instrument or pooled subgroups of instruments were able to classify patients as being at high risk of suicidal behavior with a level of accuracy suitable to be used to allocate treatment.”

Carter, G., et al. (2017). “Predicting suicidal behaviours using clinical instruments: systematic review and meta-analysis of positive predictive values for risk scales.” Br J Psychiatry 210(6): 387-395.

This was even more interesting because we recently changed our practice regarding suicide risk assessments on the psychiatry consultation service based on relatively new recommendations from the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospital Organizations (JCAHO). The Joint Commission favors the risk assessment tools.

Of course I’m not going to second-guess the Joint Commission but after 27 years (counting residency) of struggling to assess suicide risk, I’ve learned that it can hardly be reduced to any single rating instrument.

I have often said to patients that I don’t use no-suicide contracts because they’re too much like promises—and promises are broken every day. That segues into what I prefer which is to work with the patients on developing a safety plan, which I compare to no-suicide contracts by saying “a plan is better than a promise any time.”

Working on the safety plan with patients gives me another way of assessing the strength of my alliance with them and a way to improve it as well as a method for evaluating their ability to formulate a workable way to stay safe that emphasizes their individuality.

On the other hand, the safety plan is no guarantee of safety, any more than the no-suicide contract.

But often enough I’ve gotten the sense that some patients and I have even had a little fun working on suicide safety plans—ironic as that sounds. I find how important pets are, hear little anecdotes about a favorite hobby or goal, aspirations, hopes, and memories of better times when they coped really well.

Listening for understanding to someone who is contemplating suicide or who has attempted suicide is never easy. It’s the hardest thing I do. I can’t say that I’ll miss it when I retire. I have great faith in the next generation of doctors.