Gately's evening staffer duties (p. 594)
Kate Gompert, when he buzzed and went up to the 5-Woman room to look in, had made a possible sideways comment about hurting herself, and Gately has to call Pat at home about it, and she’s out or not picking up, so then he has to call the House Manager and relay the verbatim comment and let her interpret it and tell Gately what action to take and how the comment stands in relation to Gompert’s Suicide Contract and how the whole thing should be Logged. A resident at Ennet had hung herself from a heating pipe in the basement a couple years before Gately arrived, and there are now baroque procedures for monitoring ideation among residents with psych issues. The number of 5-East at St. Elizabeth’s is on a red card in Pat’s Rolodex.
Context
Suicide as institutional procedure: the Suicide Contract, the ideation-monitoring protocol built over a real body (the resident on the basement heating pipe), the psych-ward number on a red card. The halfway house has learned to route despair through paperwork because the alternative is another heating pipe. ("Hung herself," not hanged, as written.)