ABSTRACT

“A.” was a 25-year-old female who developed schizophrenia during her first year of nursing school. She had to drop out of nursing school and generally experienced very significant cognitive and other impairments from her diagnosis. This chapter describes one particular incident in which she was hospitalized and tried to kill herself, requiring an acute and life-saving intervention by the authors of this book. The chapter ends with a discussion about the anti-suicide effects of a medication known as clozapine and the very positive effects that this medication had on A. This chapter also illustrates how schizophrenia often affects people when they are in the prime of their life, and that first-episode schizophrenia is often associated with suicide, sometimes considered to be a result of a person first grappling with their new diagnosis and coming to terms with their chronic condition.