DR. BENNETT: They will express an emotion or you can deduce
what their emotion is and you repeat it back to them. “I can tell
that you’re really upset and bothered by this, sounds like you’re
feeling crushed.” They may have totally illogical reasoning for their
depression or for how they feel. It doesn’t matter. What matters is
that somebody has made that connection.
MS. ROGGEMAN: Something our community does is mental health
first aid. It’s for people who are not trained, but who are just inter-acting
with others daily. It teaches people the signs to look for. Not
everyone will say, “I’m having a hard time and I want to end my
life.” So what are the things that we need to pay attention to? And
if we get it wrong, then they are no worse off for getting the extra
support.
MS. SHIN: As a result of Hunter, I’ve been more sensitive to really
looking at my students and seeing this person seems a little more
tired today or they have dark circles under their eyes.
MS. ELMENDORF: There is, I believe, a window of time, usually
about a week or so, where they give you some clues because they’re
asking for help. They don’t want to die; they just want to escape
the pain.
MR. COOPER: After my son Hunter took his life, in an article in
the “Lumina News” I alluded to the fact that Hunter was taking a
flu medication. A lot of people told me that they became suicidal
after taking a powerful, well-known flu medication.
DR. BROWN: Hunter was best friends with my son, Dillon. Every-thing
was going well in Hunter’s life. When Jim told me he had
recently been on a medicine for the flu, as a physician that was a
flag. There are so many side effects. It has been banned in Japan
because they had so many young people taking their lives usually
within the first two to three days of taking the medicine. There
should be awareness that it’s not a perfect medicine. Physicians
need to be talking to patients if they prescribe it.
MS. ELMENDORF: My son was very shy and awkward. He had seen
a commercial about a popular antidepressant and he insisted on
taking it and in six weeks he was gone.
DR. BENNETT: They are given just way too freely, if not frivolously.
Spikes in suicide often occur when a person begins or changes their
medication.
DR. BROWN: Patients need to be really counseled: ‘We’re chang-ing
this medicine, but here are some things I want you to look
for,’ and they need to talk to the family about that, too. Byron
Stratos was a colleague of mine, an excellent eye surgeon and it’s
my understanding that during a switch from one antidepressant to
another is when he ended up taking his life.
MR. COOPER: There needs to be severe warnings about a lot of
these medicines and how dangerous and powerful they are.
DR. BENNETT: We should all be more skeptical about what is being
thrown at us on TV and in magazines. We should be more inquisi-tive
to our physicians about what is this going to do, what are the
side effects?
MS. BRENNERMAN: That’s true. I see a lot of veterans, I have one
who tried to take his life because no one was managing his medica-tions.
It was years of not sleeping and not being on the right stuff.
He said, “I wish I would have just taken a time out to really have
someone listen to me about my medications. I had to be hospital-ized
to get people to listen to me.”
WBM january 2018 46