The Great Deceiver

The Great Deceiver
We attend many psychiatric emergency calls; for me, the majority of these are suicide attempts. It amazes me how little training paramedics, police officers and firefighters have to deal with these potentially life-threatening emergencies…but that’s a topic for another post. I’ve seen attempts made by purposely taking two extra Tylenol pills to heads being removed by shotguns. I can generally categorize attempts into two groups, one is a plea for help, and the other is deadly determination to end one’s life. The resolve of the second group is genuinely chilling. Building a suicide machine in a hotel room, parking in a field and engineering a deadly carbon monoxide apparatus from their car or drowning themselves in a bucket of water are a few examples of the determination I’ve witnessed. The ones that convince us they’re okay and deny wanting to hurt themselves only to complete their task shortly after are the most harrowing for me – that’s the motivation for this image, The Great Deceiver.

TheGreatDeceiver