The elderly man was depressed, and with good reason.
At age 72, his wife had left him and was telling him he should stop seeing her friends and going to her church.
“A lot of how he identified himself was through her,” said Errika Hill, a clinical social worker with CHI Memorial’s Community Health Centers. “He had a great, great amount of depression over that, having to figure out who he was again without her.
“He was high risk for suicide,” she said. “At that point, we had to pull our crisis unit in, and they admitted him to one of our geriatric units.”
He was eventually referred to a psychiatrist and appears to be doing well.