suicide of patient on unit

TitaniaSidhe · Sep 28, 2006

I have had this happen to me, myself & a NA found him hanging in the bathroom from the hand rail during health & safety rounds. We managed to get BP & pulse back but he never regained breathing & family made the decision to remove him from life support. It was quite upsetting for a long time after that incident, I had a difficult time going into that room to make rounds- most esp working the night shift. They of course had debriefing at work, myself I found it more comforting to talk about it with other experienced mental health workers who had been through hard events over the years, somehow I just felt that if you had never experienced a incident similarly traumatic well then how could you understand how I was feeling. My staff & peers were great, I am blessed to work with a great nurse who has had her BSN wsince before I was born & over 30 yrs. experience in psych nursing, all my NA's have MANYyears experience, we were there to support each oter & talk among ourselves. I have had sadly many pretty traumatic things happen on my shift over the years at the insititution I work in, sometimes it helps me to view chronicly mentally ill as having, in a way,(I know people are gonna jump all over me for this opinion but here goes anyhow) a terminal illness. For those on whom medications do not work well, no matter what you try & what combos you give. Most hallucinations are not pleasant & well if I had to endure years of seeing & hearing unpleasant, scary things I think after a while it would make me start thinking of checking out too. This particular incident was a patient who had made serious gestures multiple times over the years secondary to chronic major depression. I guess what I am trying to say is it helps to remember you do the best you can do on any given day for your patients & we can not be responsile for another persons actions, we can only do the best we can. Try not to feel guilty, I struggle with that for a bit...but yeah I do KNOW how you feel.