"He Killed Himself cos of Her"

 

This is one of the most disturbing stories I've ever had to cover on the HPWA. A few years ago I bumped into an old colleague from the hospital, a civilian not a porter. He was a ward clerk on one of the medical levels that I used to get on well with. Like myself he had moved on to other things since we last spoke, yet he enjoyed reminiscing about life at the JRH. At one point in our conversation two names came up; one was a male nurse on one of the other med wards and another was a sister who was on the same ward. Both names were well known to me; I'll call the nurse "Fred" and the sister "Kath". We both spoke about Kath in disparaging terms because neither of us liked her. I asked my friend about Fred and whether he had heard how Fred was. My friend looked down sadly and said: "Oh, you haven't heard. I'm afraid he's dead." I was shocked. This was a man a good decade and a half younger than me and had no long-term illnesses that I was aware of. "I'm sorry to hear that." I replied and said a few words about Fred. I pointed out, with a bit of sentimental humour, that I hadn't envied him working with Kath every day. My friend nodded and said in a serious tone: "Not half! He killed himself cos of her." I was speechless. This was the first time my friend had mentioned that Fred's death had been suicide, let alone the reason behind it. "He left a note saying that he couldn't bear the way she was treating him anymore." What shocked and upset me the most about this conversation was the casual way my friend spoke. I got the feeling this wasn't the only time somebody he knew had taken his own life. What's more his tone indicated that he had come to regard suicide as normal, one of the unavoidable hazards of living, like lightning strikes or sinkholes. This normalization of suicide is horrific. I wondered how Kath had felt about this. Was she unaware of how harmful she was being, unable to understand the vulnerability of her victim; like I report here: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2025/08/unbreakable-rubber-balls.html? Possibly, but I think it's unlikely. I came across this video that contained nothing surprising and actually confirmed my own experience, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LtXyoUb6M8. It's not just doctors who are very likely to be psychopaths, so are other people in clinical professions. What's more I think Edward Dutton is being too optimistic. His research does not include the phenomenon of pseudo-psychopaths, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2025/10/its-our-job.html. 

If Kath were a full-blown psycho then obviously she would not give a damn, but if she's a pseudo-psycho she also might feel very little concern. Pseudos are capable of empathy and guilt, but they rarely feel it. They tend to invent excuses and cop-outs to exonerate themselves in their own minds. It was only years later, when I thought back over this conversation, that the fact struck me that maybe my former ward clerk colleague is similar. He spoke about Fred's suicide so nonchalantly that it seemed to me he had rationalized it away too. Or maybe he was simply desensitized by it happening in his life so often. It turns out that, tragically and scandalously, suicide is the leading cause of death among twenty to thirty-four year olds; 16% of women and 27% of men, that's over a quarter. I don't know, but I suspect that in the National Health Service that figure is even higher; we know clinical depression is very high there. This should justify a state of emergency, that dedicated people taking the king's shilling to save lives end up giving up on their own. What has gone wrong with us?
See here for more background: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2023/12/hps-and-psychos.html.
And: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2015/12/nhs-nurses-destroy-patients-doll.html.