Suicide and Poetry

With the US suicide rate reaching a new high in 2022, poetry —especially that of John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and other confessional poets who wrestled with intense emotion before ending their lives—seems ever more relevant. In “Aftermath,” the speaker describes the harrowing suicide of a patient in the hospital, her matter-of-fact tone b elying the shock of self-harm happening in the very place devoted to care and healing. The middle-stanza lyrical dream wishes somehow to reverse the mortal injury. It comprises long lines and extended between-stanzas silences, which seem to provide breathing room for reflection, demonstrating how po etry imaginatively and structurally can articulate the longing to comprehend and prevent suicide. The act of poem-making itself after this traumatic event further illustrates the utility of what could be considered a form of written expression therapy, a modality increasingly used to treat posttraum atic stress disorder. We might even wonder if the nurse-poet, in processing her own grief through writing, in turn imagines whether her patient might have been saved by writing himself. The poem’s devastating last line seems a warning to us to do more: the burnout implied in the dispirited “Some of us cry. All of us get back to work.” may be itself a risk factor for suicidal ideation and demands care and attention from our colleagues and workplaces, not least the opportunity to speak and write about experiences of powerlessn...
Source: JAMA - Category: General Medicine Source Type: research