Alarming: Health care suicides amid the coronavirus pandemic

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• Mental health experts say that PTSD due to the coronavirus pandemic is taking a toll on US health care workers on the frontlines of the battle.
• Dr. Lorna Breen, 49, an ER doctor in Manhattan killed herself Sunday after talking to her father about how heartbreaking it was to continue losing patients to the virus.
• A 23-year-old rookie Bronx EMT, John Mondello, committed suicide on Friday after less than three months on the job.

Dr. Lorna Breen, the medical director of the emergency department at New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital committed suicide Sunday in irginia where she was staying with family.

Her work amid the coronavirus pandemic took such a toll. “She was truly in the trenches of the front line,” her father, Dr. Philip Breen, told The New York Times. “Make sure she’s praised as a hero, because she was. She’s a casualty just as much as anyone else who died.”

Not only did the 49-year-old doctor care for patients affected by COVID-19; but she was infected herself. When she recovered after a week and a half, she tried to go back to work but was sent home again by the hospital. Her family brought her to Charlottesville.

Breen isn’t the only frontliner to commit suicide after seeing the terrors of the coronavirus firsthand. A 23-year-old Bronx EMT, John Mondello, fatally shot himself with a gun belonging to his retired NYPD cop dad on Friday after being on the job for less than three months, police sources told The Post.

The rookie EMT graduated from FDNY’s EMS Academy in early February and was sent straight into the “chaos” with the Tactical Response Group next to EMS Station 18 in Claremont.

Mondello, who was described by a friend as “always very peppy, very happy,” reportedly told another friend he didn’t like being an EMT.

He mentioned he “was experiencing a lot of anxiety witnessing a lot of death, he’d feel it was a heavy experience when he’d fail to save a life,” his friend said.

The coronavirus situation takes a personal toll on every single health-care worker. These frontliners working long hours, separated from family and loved ones, and at the same time trying to keep COVID-19 patients alive.

PTSD resulting from the coronavirus pandemic is becoming a very real crisis, say mental health professionals. 

Salute to all the frontliners and healthworkers of America and the world. Truly, you are heroes.

Source: New York Post