"Goldifucks"
When suicide attempts happened in my office, I turn to mentalizing
What follows is fictionalized. It is based on real events. Welcome to the Frontier Psychiatrists Newsletter. The footnotes in this article are being used to explain, as “meta-data,” the Mentalization-Based Treatment techniques used, so they are not trivial in this piece; they are the whole point. Names have been changed, and the de-identified and hybridized patients involved consented to their mashed-up and de-identified stories used in this manner.
“Do you wanna have a milkshake?1”
Maggie wore a polka-dot dress with an additional purple polka-dot bow in her hair. She stood awkwardly, unsteadily, in her patent leather shoes on top of the couch in my office. The awkwardness in her balance was exacerbated by the fact that she was trying to push herself upward to grasp the other end of the electrical cable that was wrapped around her neck as she flung it up over an exposed pipe.
Maggie was trying to hang herself.2
“Wait, what?” said Maggie, with her eyes locked onto mine, momentarily…