How the show 13 Reasons Why can help you in the exam room

“I think my friend has attempted suicide” an 11-year-old child haltingly admitted after I introduced myself as a crisis counselor with a national hotline and asked how I could help.*  Over the next half hour I learned that this child and her friend had been facing ongoing cyber- and face-to-face bullying at school that was such a common occurrence the caller sounded nonchalant. The caller’s friend, however, had already attempted suicide at least twice in her young 12 years of life. In the middle of our call, my caller received a text from her friend saying that she was okay, had been in a fight with her family and fallen asleep, and would meet her at school shortly. According the 11-year-old, her friend had never been found out in her past attempts, and I was the first adult to learn of them. Before taking calls like this from people all over the country, I practiced as a member of multiple interdisciplinary health care teams and distinctly remember the dismay in the medical providers’ eyes when they came into my office for a consult after finding what appeared to be self-inflicted cuts on a child’s body during a routine exam. The story was always some frustrating variation on a poker-faced youngster unwilling to talk about how those wounds had gotten there, and I learned that it is often difficult to determine if superficial wounds are self-harming or evidence of an experiment or gesture towards suicide. One of the things we often learned togeth...
Source: Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog - Category: General Medicine Authors: Tags: Conditions Pediatrics Primary care Psychiatry Source Type: blogs