Solving Suicide

‘It has been some time since you were here at the hospital, and we hope things are going well for you.’
STAFF MEMBER, A SAMPLE NOTE SENT FROM A PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL

‘You will never know what your little notes mean to me.’
FORMER PATIENT, IN A WRITTEN RESPONSE

THE SUICIDAL THOUGHTS started when Kristina Mossgraber was 17. A loud voice in her head told her that she was a bad person, a failure, better off dead. She cut herself in secret and told no one about the thoughts slamming around her brain, except her pediatrician, who dismissed them as normal teen angst. But her suicidal thoughts and behaviors didn’t stop. “I was so good at hiding it and kind of normalizing it.” She remembers thinking, “I just need to keep these to myself.”

She did, all through her 20s and early 30s, until one September day in 2014 she drove three hours from her home in Rochester, N.Y., where no one would find her, and cut her neck and the veins down her arms. After struggling to hide her wounds for four days, she went to an emergency room. A doctor sent her home. “They didn’t think I was suicidal enough,” she says.

Mossgraber was referred to an outpatient treatment program, but she couldn’t absorb any of the information; she went through the motions, all the while planning how she was going to kill herself. She withdrew from friends and skipped Sunday dinners with her family. “I was falling deeper and deeper into this despair,” she says.

Three months later, she bought a jug of antifreeze, mixed it with Gatorade and woke up days later in the intensive-care unit. Once inside, she had a different experience. After doctors stabilized her, the psychiatric team helped