TW: suicide

Spent 20 minutes talking one-on-one to a girl who’s suicidal and finally managed to calm her down only to have a nurse tell me I shouldn’t have done that because “she’s just doing it for attention.” Of COURSE she is, she fucking needs attention right now! The fuck?

How do you become a psych nurse and not understand that? This girl had a *plan* and very clearly wanted someone to talk her out of it. Which I did, and which wasn’t fucking easy either. Plenty of other staff tried before me and got nowhere.

In fact the “doing it for attention” angle specifically came up in our conversation, and I told her that’s what emotions are, that’s why we cry: to let others know we’re in pain.

It usually doesn’t fall to the on-unit staff to do this unless they specifically ask for one of us but the nurses let over an hour go by after she’d written them a note about her plan so I went in and talked to her. One positive is I’m more confident in my therapy competence now.

I validated her feelings without being corny about it. I asked her when the last time she was happy was and she mentioned a relationship she’d made with another patient who’d left. I got her to look forward to seeing her again after she’s discharged because they exchanged info.

It really isn’t too hard if you give a shit and understand what the problem is. I asked her if she’d still want to kill herself if she didn’t feel so shitty and she said no. So she eventually said she’d give the meds time to work and try making friends with her new roommates.

I mean it’s not like she needed someone to cure her depression, she just needed someone to give her some reasons to live in that moment to get her through the day. People need to stop pretending that talking to suicidal people is this Herculean feat.