Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: suicide

  • What could have been

    Gordon SunDowney, California, United States Every year, there are 400 stories like these. The second-year medical student. The social butterfly of her 106 classmates, yet her bubbly personality masks the loneliness of living on one coast after spending the first twenty-five years of her life on the other coast. The isolation is amplified by the…

  • Death and new-doctor eyes

    Katrina GenuisVancouver, Canada With slim cuts to her wrists, she came into the emergency room and said she wanted to die. “This is clearly a cry for attention,” others said. “Send the new doctor to stitch her up.” I sat by her bed with a 30-gauge lidocaine-filled needle and 4.0 nylon sutures, and began unravelling…

  • When a movie ticket to the battered may help!

    Rema SundarTrivandrum, Kerala, India Domestic violence awareness through film When four-time Grammy Award winner Tracy Chapman crooned “Last night I heard the screaming,” she was reflecting on a global public health problem. Instances of abuse and violence do not discriminate based on wealth, race, or education. ‘The World’s Women 2015″ report from the United Nations …

  • Suicide in medical school

    Trevor KleeCambridge, MA, United States Depression and suicide are difficult subjects to write about because they are unpleasant and have at least a faint tinge of moral failure. Moreover, the enormity of the feelings involved dwarfs the attempts to portray them in writing. Perhaps the best written description of suicidal ideation comes from David Foster…

  • End-of-life care and contingent vs. non-contingent duties

    Ronald W. PiesBoston, Massachusetts, United States Introduction Mr. Joseph B, a 70-year-old widower and retired college professor, is hospitalized in the final stages of metastatic pancreatic carcinoma. His doctors estimate that he has “three or four weeks” to live. The patient is well aware of his prognosis, and, as he puts it, “I have come…

  • Shame

    Jeanne BereiterAlbuquerque, New Mexico, United States “I wasn’t trying to kill myself,” Jessica insisted, running a black-tipped, artificial fingernail through her black, gelled hair, which flashed blonde at the roots. “I was drinking, and I miscalculated. I didn’t know this could happen.” Jessica had been admitted to my adolescent psychiatric unit after she fell down…

  • A twice-told tale: Nabokov and Moore on mental illness and parents’ suffering

    Carol LevineNew York, New York, United States Mental illness casts a wide net, enmeshing patient, family, and doctors. When the patient is young, the main characters are usually parents, who struggle with love, guilt, fear, and despair. Yet families are often secondary, sometimes shadowy, characters in clinical accounts. Fiction allows parents to be the primary…

  • Suffocating in the bell jar: The euthanasia request by the unbearably suffering, depressed patient

    Barend FlorijnAd KapteinThe Netherlands Introduction The Dutch Euthanasia Act took effect in the Netherlands in 2002. Since then the official euthanasia number of patients with a mental disorder has risen from 13 in 2011 to 42 patients in 2013.1 This Act regulates the ending of one’s life by a physician at the request of an unbearably…

  • Possessions

    Margaret Irene BaczewskiTucson, Arizona, USA People with mental illness are widely misunderstood by others. For my senior thesis project at the University of Michigan’s School of Art and Design, I created a series of four wearable objects that served as cathartic aids to different psychological disorders. For every piece, I did extensive research on the…