@article{ref1,
title="Suicide and poetry",
journal="JAMA journal of the American Medical Association",
year="2024",
author="Campo, Rafael",
volume="331",
number="10",
pages="e889-e889",
abstract="With the US suicide rate reaching a new high in 2022, poetry--especially that of John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and other confessional poets who wrestled with intense emotion before ending their lives--seems ever more relevant. In &quot;Aftermath,&quot;1 the speaker describes the harrowing suicide of a patient in the hospital, her matter-of-fact tone belying the shock of self-harm happening in the very place devoted to care and healing. The middle-stanza lyrical dream wishes somehow to reverse the mortal injury. It comprises long lines and extended between-stanzas silences, which seem to provide breathing room for reflection, demonstrating how poetry imaginatively and structurally can articulate the longing to comprehend and prevent suicide. The act of poem-making itself after this traumatic event further illustrates the utility of what could be considered a form of written expression therapy, a modality increasingly used to treat posttraumatic stress disorder.2 We might even wonder if the nurse-poet, in processing her own grief through writing, in turn imagines whether her patient might have been saved by writing himself. The poem's devastating last line seems a warning to us to do more: the burnout implied in the dispirited &quot;Some of us cry. All of us get back to work.&quot; may be itself a risk factor for suicidal ideation3,4 and demands care and attention from our colleagues and workplaces, not least the opportunity to speak and write about experiences of powerlessness.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0098-7484",
doi="10.1001/jama.2023.27993",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1001/jama.2023.27993"
}