My encouragement and human care failed to retrieve her from the pit into which she was slipping. No longer trying to disguise her pain as most patients do, she wore it like a veil draped around her fragile spirit. Only twenty–seven years old, she looked like a much older woman, broken and shattered by life. Yet she was hard to work with because she had accepted her emotional death and was ready to plan her physical death as soon as she could arrange it. Although she was deeply disturbed at failing in her suicide attempt, I would not describe her as a resistant patient. Within a few hours she was discovered and rushed to our facility for treatment. She had spent months stashing away sleeping pills and then, in a clear, calculated way, wrote a farewell letter to her mother (who had never been able to show her the love she needed), drove down to the ocean, consumed a large quantity of pills and alcohol…and then waited. She had been admitted to the psychiatric unit of the hospital after being rushed to the Emergency Room following a serious suicide attempt. The silence in my office was broken only by the long deep sighs of my newly assigned patient, Elizabeth.
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