Abstract
People who attempt suicide as well as those who actually take their own life often have communicated their suicidal thoughts and feelings to healthcare professionals in some form. Suicidality is one of the most challenging caring situations and the impacts of suicide care affect both the professional and personal lives of healthcare professionals. This study investigates how mental health professionals perceive suicide while providing psychiatric care and how this perception impacts their continued care work. This qualitative exploratory study includes 19 mental health professionals in psychiatry who had provided care for patients who had taken their own life. Analysis followed the principle of phenomenography. The findings reveal that these healthcare professionals experienced an internal conflict that affected them both personally and professionally. In response to these conflicts, the healthcare professionals developed strategies that involved a safety zone and increased vigilance. Those who were able to commute and balance a safe spot and learning to be more vigilant seem to have developed as a result of patient's suicide. These findings have the potential to help establish a post-suicide caring process where healthcare professionals learn to make better suicide assessments, become more open to talking about death with patients, and develop a humbler approach to understanding a patient's suicide.
Highlights
Healthcare professionals (HCPs) focus on healing, but inevitably they must deal with the death of a patient (Whitworth 1984)
It seems that people who attempt suicide (Coombs et al 1992; Wolk-Wasserman 1987) as well as those who die by suicide (Isometsa et al 1995) in some way communicate suicidal thoughts and feelings to HCPs
An adverse incident can result in HCPs experiencing shock, devastation, sadness, guilt, shame and grief, psychological devastation that has even resulted in death by suicide of HCPs (Hendin et al 2000; Pratt & Jachna 2015; Ruskin et al 2004)
Summary
Healthcare professionals (HCPs) focus on healing, but inevitably they must deal with the death of a patient (Whitworth 1984). HCPs should have the opportunity to process and reflect on the affects the death may have on their professional and personal lives (Orbach 2008; Rehnsfeldt 1999). Both the healthcare system and the public view deaths during ongoing curative and preventive care (in contrast to palliative care) as avoidable and the result of medical error. Joyce and Wallbridge (2003) found that some HCPs blame one another, blame themselves and fear being held responsible for the death of a patient even though the care they had given before the patient’s suicide had maintained the expected professional and organizational standards. Hultsj€o, W€ardig, and Rytterstr€om (2019) found that HCPs experienced an emptiness caused by their inability to relieve a patient of suicidal thoughts, and this experience stayed with the HCPs beyond the death of the patient, a response often triggered by other suicidal patients
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