A Psychiatrist's Visit to Mount Doom

a piece of writing. from before I was a writer...

I wrote this in 2016. I’m not sure if it holds true anymore…in fact, I’m almost certain it doesn’t.

This is form before I was an Interventional Brain Medicine identified doctor.

I was still considering myself a psychiatrist and therapist with limited tools including white-knuckling it and therapy that works but takes a while. I was a LOTR fan, even then. Enjoy this very early dispatch from the vaults for what it is: a time capsule. I did light editing to make the it suck less.

The Way Back Machine

When taking care of suicidal patients, as physicians, we are entrusted with, to quote Frodo Baggins:

“A terrible burden.”

This human before us may die. We have an obligation. Yet unlike critical care medicine, we can't grab hold of a person's physiology, nor push their broken head and heart back together with a whole team of technologists and healers.

There is no extracorporeal membrane oxygenation to infuse hope for depression like that machine does oxygen for cardiopulmonary failur…