suicide

My female owner was recently assigned a client who just attempted suicide. Although the clinic she is currently attached to (it’s not the parenting clinic) is not a crisis clinic, the clinic manager decided to accept the client on a see-first basis. Hence, my female owner’s job is to assess her suicidality and make recommendations from there.

After Wednesday’s tense discussion about not having assessed the teenager for suicide ideation, my female owner is feeling somewhat apprehensive about seeing this client tomorrow.

My female owner is no stranger to suicide. She had suicidal ideation before (this is not surprising as statistics show that 1 in 17 people have thoughts of suicide over the past 12 months. That's like 11 friends in her Facebook). Her friends have spoken to her about their suicide attempts. An honours course-mate had committed suicide (who says being a mental health expert is a protective factor against emotional upheavals?). Two years ago, she was trained in suicide assessment. She even trained countless others on suicide risk assessments. In her work, she supported someone who had attempted suicide by jumping off the 9th storey of a building but had her fall broken by bamboo poles. She did crisis intervention with someone else who got into trouble at work and was suicidal. The organisation wanted her to assess if he kill himself before he resigned the next day (how practical). She also did mass debriefing for groups of people who lost their colleague through suicide. During counselling, she had asked her clients with depression at work about their suicidality. A young client had once smsed her to inform that he was suicidal and she had to activate a host of people to hunt him down and get him admitted into hospital.

Yet, this feels more pressurising. My female owner didn’t get a chance to talk to her new supervisor about this case, so she’s going into it by herself. She tried to arm herself by reading about the art of suicide assessment the whole day.

Oh, did I mention that my brother, Nana, accidentally killed himself?