A wife’s moving letter about her doctor husband’s suicide has gone viral after she made it public, saying she didn’t want the manner of his death kept a secret.
Brisbane gastroenterologist Andrew Bryant look his own life on May 4 in his medical offices. Just days later, his wife, Susan Bryant, wrote an email to Bryant’s colleagues and friends to tell them of his suicide, and her son John shared it on social media, where it has since been circulated widely.
“I don’t want it to be a secret that Andrew committed suicide,” she wrote in the letter. “If more people talked about what leads to suicide, if people didn’t talk about [it] as if it was shameful, if people understood how easily and quickly depression can take over, then there might be fewer deaths.
“His four children and I are not ashamed of how he died.”
She subsequently told The Courier Mail that although she had no desire to be an “internet sensation”, her husband would be proud if talking about the way he died helped another person.
Susan Bryant wrote that her husband had been working hard both at his private practice in Spring Hill and for public hospitals – when he was ‘on call’ for a hospital, he would sometimes be called out three or four times during the night, missing family dinners and even his children’s birthday parties – and had had trouble sleeping, but that that was normal.
This letter encourages us all to act when we see the subtle signs someone’s struggling. For crisis support call @Lifeline 13 11 14 #RUOK https://t.co/KhDckVdax2
— R U OK? (@ruokday) May 11, 2017
However, he seemed unusually anxious about issues such as his practice’s paperwork and finances, about his patients, and even about his own competence as a doctor, she wrote.
“He seemed very dispirited and non-communicative,” Susan Bryant recalled in her letter. “I did what I could to help where I could but I was confused – he’d always been busy and the practice was, as far as I could tell, was running just as it had for the last 20 years.”
She said that as the weeks end on, she noticed that his mood was becoming increasingly “flat” and urged him to speak to her or a doctor, but he refused. He had never before suffered with depression, she said.
“On Tuesday evening he was upset and teary because a patient had died,” Susan Bryant wrote. “Andrew was always upset when any of his patients died, but his level of distress in this case was unusual.”
In retrospect, she wrote, “the signs were all there. But I didn’t see it coming.” Nor, she added, did his family, even though both Bryant’s parents were psychiatrists, two of his brothers are doctors and his sister is a psychiatric nurse.
“So please, forward this email on to anyone in the Wilston community who has asked how he died, anyone at all that might want to know, or anyone you think it may help,” Susan Bryant concluded.
If you are thinking about suicide, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14.