How switching to psychiatry made me understand suicide far better

"I realized that training in psychiatry would give me the opportunity to understand suicide far better, and hopefully allow me to make a difference at an earlier stage. My exposure to psychiatry in medical school was clearly not enough. I was ill-equipped to fully grasp when individuals begin to have thoughts of suicide and when those thoughts progress into planning or researching methods – and then acting on them. As I thought back to the numbers of dead-on-arrival patients that I attended to in Detroit – dead by overdoses, self-inflicted gunshot wounds or stabbings, electrocution, asphyxia, drowning or jumping from tall buildings – I knew that I wanted to do more than pronounce people and fill out death certificates. Becoming a psychiatrist could help me save some of these despairing souls."

Michael F. Myers is a psychiatrist and author of Becoming a Doctors’ Doctor: A Memoir.

He shares his story and discusses his KevinMD article, "Training in psychiatry would give me the opportunity to understand suicide far better." (https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2021/01/training-in-psychiatry-would-give-me-the-opportunity-to-understand-suicide-far-better.html)