The Needed and Unwanted Doorkeeper

This chapter explores how in a very literal sense, the mental health care professionals part of the study were doorkeepers, equipped with keys and a mandate to open and close doors for patients and those visiting them. In several of the accounts the door played a significant role—emblematic of the difference between those who had power and those who didn’t, a signifier of the asymmetry between professionals and patients. At the same time, the door was also a means of protection against acts of violence, the only barrier standing between the professional and the unknown, potentially dangerous, condition of a very ill patient. The second part of the chapter explores “door-keeping” in a metaphorical sense related to protecting patients from taking their own lives—thus being “doorkeepers” between life and death. The narrators shared stories about being actively and sometimes physically involved in life-saving episodes, preventing the premature death of patients, but also experiences of patients slipping through “the door”, losing them to suicide.