How switching to psychiatry made me understand suicide far better

<p>"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."</p> <p><a href="http://www.michaelfmyers.com/" target="_blank" rel= "noopener noreferrer">Michael F. Myers</a> is a psychiatrist and author of <a href="https://amzn.to/2NaRG2N" target= "_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Becoming a Doctors’ Doctor: A Memoir</a>.</p> <p>He shares his story and discusses his KevinMD article, "<a href= "https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2021/01/training-in-psychiatry-would-give-me-the-opportunity-to-understand-suicide-far-better.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Training in psychiatry would give me the opportunity to understand suicide far better</a>." (<a href= "https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2021/01/training-in-psychiatry-would-give-me-the-opportunity-to-understand-suicide-far-better.html">https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2021/01/training-in-psychiatry-would-give-me-the-opportunity-to-understand-suicide-far-better.html</a>)</p>