The head of the emergency department at a Manhattan hospital committed suicide after spending days on the front lines of the coronavirus battle, her family said Monday.
Lorna Breen, 49, was the emergency room medical director at New York Presbyterian Allen Hospital in Inwood. “She tried to do her job, and it killed her”, her father Philip Breen, who is also a doctor, told the media.
Breen said his daughter had gotten sick with the virus while on the job at one point, but then returned to work after about a week and a half of recuperating. He added that she had no history of mental illness, but when they last spoke, she told him how excruciating it was to have to continually watch contagion patients die.
Just two days earlier, a Bronx emergency medical technician fatally shot himself with a gun.
Since the beginning of the crisis and the collapse of the countries’ health systems, mental health experts have repeatedly warned that PTSD from the pandemic is becoming a very real crisis, and that the group that is most at risk are the front-line health care workers.
“It’s just very depressing because people in the ICU aren’t really coming out of it, and I don’t think my patients are going to live”, a doctor said.
