ER doctor who treated COVID patients dies by suicide

Not that it's related necessarily, but suicides always peak in May.

Looks like the story is paywalled, OP.

I suspect something might have been going on with her not related to the pandemic. I mean, who knows, but the family went up and sort of intervened, bringing her back from NYC. She was home when she killed herself.

r2 apologies, will copy and paste

A top emergency room doctor at a Manhattan hospital that treated many coronavirus patients died by suicide on Sunday, her father and the police said.

Dr. Lorna M. Breen, the medical director of the emergency department at NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, died in Charlottesville, Va., where she was staying with family, her father said in an interview.

Tyler Hawn, a spokesman for the Charlottesville Police Department, said in an email that officers on Sunday responded to a call seeking medical assistance.

“The victim was taken to U.V.A. Hospital for treatment, but later succumbed to self-inflicted injuries,” Mr. Hawn said.

Dr. Breen’s father, Dr. Philip C. Breen, said she had described devastating scenes of the toll the coronavirus took on patients.

“She tried to do her job, and it killed her,” he said.

The elder Dr. Breen said his daughter had contracted the coronavirus but had gone back to work after recuperating for about a week and a half. The hospital sent her home again, before her family intervened to bring her to Charlottesville, he said.

Dr. Breen, 49, did not have a history of mental illness, her father said. But he said that when he last spoke with her, she seemed detached, and he could tell something was wrong. She had described to him an onslaught of patients who were dying before they could even be taken out of ambulances.

“She was truly in the trenches of the front line,” he said.

He added: “Make sure she’s praised as a hero, because she was. She’s a casualty just as much as anyone else who has died.”

In a statement, NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia used that language to describe her. “Dr. Breen is a hero who brought the highest ideals of medicine to the challenging front lines of the emergency department,” the statement said. “Our focus today is to provide support to her family, friends and colleagues as they cope with this news during what is already an extraordinarily difficult time.”

Dr. Angela Mills, head of emergency medical services for several NewYork-Presbyterian campuses, including Allen, sent an email to hospital staffers on Sunday night informing them of Dr. Breen’s death. The email, which was reviewed by The New York Times, did not mention a cause of death. Dr. Mills, who could not be reached for comment, said in the email that the hospital was deferring to the family’s request for privacy.

“A death presents us with many questions that we may not be able to answer,” the email read.

Aside from work, Dr. Breen filled her time with friends, hobbies and sports, friends said. She was an avid member of a New York ski club and traveled regularly out west to ski and snowboard. She was also a deeply religious Christian who volunteered at a home for older people once a week, friends said. Once a year, she threw a large party on the roof deck of her Manhattan home.

She was very close with her sisters and mother, who lived in Virginia.

One colleague said he had spent dozens of hours talking to Dr. Breen not only about medicine but about their lives and the hobbies she enjoyed, which also included salsa dancing. She was a lively presence, outgoing and extroverted, at work events, the colleague said.

NewYork-Presbyterian Allen is a 200-bed hospital at the northern tip of Manhattan that at times had as many as 170 patients with Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. As of April 7, there had been 59 patient deaths at the hospital, according to an internal document.

Dr. Lawrence A. Melniker, the vice chair for quality care at the NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital, said that Dr. Breen was a well-respected and well-liked doctor in the NewYork-Presbyterian system, a network of hospitals that includes the Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the Weill Cornell Medical Center.

“You don’t get to a position like that at Allen without being very talented,” he said.

Dr. Melniker said the coronavirus had presented unusual mental health challenges for emergency physicians throughout New York, the epicenter of the crisis in the United States.

Doctors are accustomed to responding to all sorts of grisly tragedies, he said. But rarely do they have to worry about getting sick themselves, or about infecting their colleagues, friends and family members.

And rarely do they have to treat their own co-workers.

Another colleague said that Dr. Breen was always looking out for others, making sure her doctors had protective equipment or whatever else they needed. Even when she was home recovering from Covid-19, she texted her co-workers to check in and see how they were doing, the colleague said.

PTSD.

RIP.

I believe it. Lot of doctors in my family and they’re all struggling mentally right now. :(

Heartbreaking. She sounds like she was among the very best of the medical professionals tirelessly battling this pandemic. Her father is right: she is a hero.

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

R10, your link...it has a stink.

R10 - that's Russia for you.

God I hate the Daily Mail and all its ads - it is a wonder how anyone can read that thing. If you're going to have ads, make them load faster instead of this constant loading and shifting of the text. It's exhausting.

That's just so tragic. What a loss. I hate Trump with a thousand suns.

I agree with R3, well-adjusted individuals without underlying mental health issues don’t usually commit suicide. By well-adjusted I mean having resiliency to overcome personal and professional challenges. When digging deeper there’s almost always more there. The poor lady likely had been experiencing some problems that she may have been hiding from others.

Many health professionals who achieve high level of success also tend to be perfectionists and hide problems from others for that reason. This is why burnout, stress, and depression remain issues of concern in healthcare professionals. All of those things can lead to increased risk of suicide. I had a classmate in a Ph. D nursing research course a few years ago who hung himself shortly before he was to receive his doctorate. His area of specialty both work and academic was pediatric oncology. We’d suspected from piecing together clues after his death that he had hid his severe depression which was then worsened by traumatic experiences caring for children with cancer.

She dies while deplorables live. There is no God.

How sad

That's sad.

Who plays her in Pandemic!

Very interesting comments.

It is time we have even more attention to this issue — it’s no different than soldiers coming back from serving overseas. Anything we can do to humanize this catastrophe will also weaken the effectiveness of protesting. People needs to see names, faces, and stories. And we need a plan for how to help healthcare workers.

[quote] “She tried to do her job, and it killed her,” he said.

No, the realization that she was back in Charlottesville, VA killed her.

She had great teeth.

I'll add this article here, too.

Very sad. Handsome young EMT with only a few months on the job overwhelmed by the loss of those he helped.

r8 "lots of doctors in my family" Well la di fucking da! I hope your family of doctors all get coronavirus you insufferable braggart.

R22 ran out of TP it seems.

^^^Da Fuq?!! @22

R21 had a hot ass, but.....

This is heartbreaking. Where I live we haven't been hot nearly as hard as some places, can't even imagine the things those people saw.

It's compassion fatigue. Anecdotally a friend and coworker both survived coronavirus and are now really depressed. The meathead coworker who can literally only talk about sports and work told us he thought he'd be "so happy to be alive, but I'm sad all the time." I know it affects the brain, I'm wondering if anyone else has heard of this side effect of it.

Sad news. Her smile did not reach her eyes.

You’ve got a pretty big chip on your shoulder, R22.

[quote]Where I live we haven't been hot nearly as hard as some places

Sometimes typos can be the funniest things.

Even before this virus hit, imagine the tragic things she saw working day in and day out in an emergency room in New York City. Being exposed to trauma and tragedy on a daily basis really fucks with your head. It’s like people in the medical profession get PTSD. Eventually it catches up to you and manifests itself in different ways. A lot of medical professionals are addicts or alcoholics as well.

Sure, very unfortunate, but maybe she was in the wrong profession if it affected her that much. ER docs are there to treat trauma of all degrees...death is just part of that. And I'm sorry...we throw the term "hero" around way too much. She was doing the job she was paid to do, just like every other doc and nurse and cop and mechanic. She couldn't take the heat, and she left the kitchen.

r32 is fun at parties

Some nurses in Italy suicided. A Japanese healthcare officer who dealt with diamond princess cruise incident suicided. A German chief of finance department suicided due to the pressure on economy

R32, if you spent more than 1 hour in the ER in the past month you would change your tune. The amount of people coming into the ER with shortness of breath and covid was like nothing I’ve ever seen. And that doesn’t even include the psychological trauma of having Covid floating all around you and not having proper PPE to protect yourself.

Good luck R22. There is such a thing as karma.