Gasping for Air: Working With a Suicidal Patient

ABSTRACT

Nearly one million people kill themselves every year, a staggering statistic that translates into someone taking their own life every 40 seconds. By the time you have finished reading this paper, 45 people will have killed themselves. This is very conservative estimate because suicides and attempted suicides are widely under reported. Still, we know that suicide has been rising steadily since 2000. And researchers fear that the number of suicides will climb even higher, a wide-reaching effect of social isolation, anxiety and heightened economic distress brought on by the pandemic. What leads a person to become suicidal is complex. There is never a single cause. In this paper I will explore a theme that pushed my patient, Zoe, to that dangerous ledge: a loss of “twinship” or a sense of being human among human that left her feeling like a freak—cast out of the world of “normal” people.

KEYWORDS:

• Suicide
• twinship
• leading edge
• trailing edge
• intersubjective

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Zoe for granting her permission to publish the story of our work together. I am deeply grateful for her interest in reading this chapter beforehand and for her sharp and sensitive editorial comments. I appreciate Zoe’s willingness to collaborate with me to find ways to disguise identifying details and to clarify details that felt way too important to disguise. The narrative of our psychoanalytic work touched Zoe who said she felt “more known, understood and cared about” than ever before. She chose the pseudonym “Zoe” because it is an “unencumbered name.” Zoe means “life” in Greek.

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Notes on contributors

Laura D’Angelo

Laura D’Angelo, MDiv, LP, is a writer and psychoanalyst in New York City. She is a training analyst and supervisor at National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis and the Training and Research in Intersubjective Self Psychology in New York City. In her prior career, she worked as a journalist with credits in national magazines, newspapers and academic journals.