A young patient died on her psychiatry unit, and what followed was not what she expected. The coroner opened a case. The police arrived to interview her. The debrief was a hallway check-in. Devina Maya Wadhwa, a psychiatrist who writes about physician wellness, walks through the days and weeks after the code, the self-doubt spiral every clinician knows, and the gap between how psychiatry units are built to handle suicide and how unprepared they are for sudden medical death.

⏱️ Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:30 The code blue she never expected to run
2:35 Why a psych unit isn't built for a code blue
3:51 The emotional shock the whole team carried
5:09 What the constable's questions actually felt like
5:45 Why the debrief didn't do the job
7:01 What real support would have looked like
8:29 The hypervigilance that took over after the loss
10:46 The quiet question every physician carries
12:07 Take home messages

About this episode:
Devina Maya Wadhwa is a psychiatrist who writes about physician wellness, and in this conversation she walks through one of the hardest events of her career: a young patient suffered a sudden cardiac event and died on her psychiatry unit, while she was the most responsible physician. She describes why psychiatry units are uniquely unprepared for this kind of loss, with oxygen tanks locked away, crash carts slowed by corridor design, and nursing staff trained for emotional safety rather than medical resuscitation. She talks honestly about the coroner's investigation, the police interview that felt like an interrogation, and the days she moved through in a numbing fashion. She names the universal physician question that surfaced for her and her whole team, "did I do something wrong," and the institutional debrief that checked the box without actually helping anyone process the loss. She argues that real support is not a single hallway "are you OK" but a continued check-in weeks later, and that physicians too often cushion grief, put it in a ball, and hide it somewhere until the time to process never comes. She closes on why vulnerability about these losses matters, both for the clinicians carrying them and for the next generation of physicians learning how to survive them.

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