That way, her roommates would think she was sleeping. Most times, she would take a bunch of pills just before bedtime. For about the next decade, Amanda didn’t make a few attempts. At 20, she tried to kill herself for the first time. Her parents were going through an ugly divorce just as her social anxiety and her perfectionism at school kicked in hard. Her first thoughts of suicide had come shortly after her 14th birthday. I have always done what is needed to be done and when I can stop pretending I let it out.” In an email she’d sent her therapist a month earlier, she confessed that she would occasionally put on a “mask of normalcy.” Sure, patients were always commenting on how upbeat she was, but “the part they didn’t see,” she wrote, “was me turning around, me leaving the room, me getting in my car at the end of the day, taking a deep breath and me crying all the way home. There was no way she would answer them herself. Have you relapsed since your last visit? Can you afford your newborn’s car seat? Do you have a history of mental health problems? She hated those questions. She ran through her mandated checklist of questions. She measured their blood pressure, their weight. That day, September 28, 2007, was her first shift seeing patients without a supervisor watching over her.Īmanda’s schedule was relatively light: three, maybe four patients. She was inspired by their resilience and felt only slightly jealous of the ones who had found antidepressants that worked.

Some of her patients were in recovery, others were homeless, several had fled physically abusive men. She had taken a pay cut to join this clinic outside Seattle, in part because she wanted to treat low-income mothers and pregnant women. As usual, she arrived at the office earlier than just about everyone else, needing the extra time to get comfortable. She had thought about taking a sick day, but she didn’t want to upset her co-workers or draw attention to herself. Only plan tonight is to come home and take a nap.”Īmanda was a 29-year-old nurse, pale and thin-a quiet rule-follower. “Got to try and get through the day, hope I can shift my mind enough to focus. “Not a good night last night, had a disturbing dream,” she wrote. Before walking out the door, she sent her therapist an email. She told herself she would do it sometime after work.Īmanda showered. She wasn’t going to do it then, not at 5:30 in the morning on a Friday. It was still dark outside when Amanda woke up to the sound of her alarm, got out of bed and decided to kill herself.

Cry of fear suicide