Author Question: A highly suicidal patient who has been hospitalized for 2 weeks committed suicide during the night. ... (Read 31 times)

D2AR0N · **on:** Jul 19, 2018

A highly suicidal patient who has been hospitalized for 2 weeks committed suicide during the night. The measure that will be helpful to staff and patients having to deal with the event is:

a. asking the patient's roommate not to discuss the event with other patients.
b. keeping newspapers off the unit and sending the television out for repair..
c. holding a staff meeting to express feelings and plan care for other patients.
d. discharging the other patients as quickly as possible to prevent copycat attempts.

Question 2

The client is angrily telling the caregiver about what people have been doing to him. The most therapeutic response is,

1. Those are terrible things for them to do to you.
2. Why are you telling me? I haven't done anything to you.
3. It must be difficult to feel alone and threatened like that.
4. It doesn't make any sense for your neighbors to do these things to you.

kescobar@64 · **Reply #1 on:** Jul 19, 2018

Answer to Question 1

C
Interventions should be aimed at helping the staff and patients come to terms with the loss and grow as a result of the incident. A psychological postmortem assessment should be conducted by staff. A community meeting should be scheduled to inform patients and encourage them to share their feelings and responses. Staff should provide additional support and reassurance to patients and should seek opportunities for peer support and clinical supervision. Efforts to reduce exposure to information about the death would reduce trust, prevent opportunities to help survivors cope, and likely prove ineffective, since such news can almost never be contained. Rushing the discharge of surviving patients would be unsafe and unethical.

Answer to Question 2

3
Therapeutic response: reflection