Nursing Suicide Case Study

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Mental illness can be found in many areas of nursing including the fast-paced area of the emergency department. In this department it is vital for a nurse to screen for a patient’s previous or current risk of suicide. A known detailed plan or a simple thought of committing suicide by a patient is to be noted by a nurse immediately. A nurse must also assess for any known risk factors or psychiatric disorders that a patient could currently have, which could possibly lead to suicide. Folse et al. state that “The Risk of Suicide Questionnaire (RSQ) can be administered by nurses as part of initial assessment, and the results could drive decisions regarding appropriate nursing actions” (Folse, Eich, Hall, Ruppman, 2006, p. 27). An emergency department …show more content…
If a nurse is unable to do this quickly, then a patient may not receive proper medical treatment in addition to psychiatric treatment. These conditions must first be observed as soon as a patient is seen by a nurse. A nurse must first evaluate the possible practice of self-harm if he or she can see obvious signs of attempted suffocation, self-inflicted gunshot wounds, hanging marks, drowning symptoms, poisoning symptoms, cuts, and burns. While these signs don’t consider all causes of suicide or self-harm, they highlight key identifiers. Once a nurse has evaluated the physical signs of attempted self-inflicted pain (or death), one must speak to the patient to find out how serious a patient is about committing suicide. When speaking, a nurse must use therapeutic techniques to gain information from a patient by using non-judgmental, open-ended questions that seek to detect overarching themes, thoughts, and feelings. In order to do this, a nurse must determine what predisposing factors (long-term factors), risk factors (acute symptoms), and protective factors (increase or decrease a person’s risk level) are …show more content…
305-306). The accumulation of this information offers the healthcare team in the emergency department data that can help make a quick decision to whether a patient is suicidal or not. All information assessed can be put together to identify if someone falls into one of the categories of “patients with suicidal ideation, a plan, and intent to harm themselves; patients with suicidal ideation and a plan, but without intent; and thirdly, patients with suicidal ideation but no plan or intent to harm themselves” (Mitchell et al., 2005, p. 306). The specific category a patient identifies with will become more evident to a nurse the more he or she speaks with him or her. The nurse should not be rude or make the patient feel like he or she is being threatened while obtaining information because this may limit the responses a nurse may receive from a patient. A caring and interested approach by the nurse will allow the patient to express more feelings or current moods that may elicit to a patient’s inner thoughts. An example of this is if a patient is showing signs of feeling down or depressed to a nurse because he or she believes that they care about
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