I recently saw an episode of Chicago Med, a series in which they talk about medical issues, I particularly like everything that has to do with medicine, this episode talked -among several things- about a teenager who tried to commit suicide. This young girl is dark-skinned and came after ingesting a large amount of an opioid (medication used for pain), which led her to a state of deep unconsciousness.
As it happens in real life, a case of intoxication must be attended immediately, the respective antidote is given, in case it is known what she has ingested, once the patient is stabilized, an interconsultation is made with nephrology, internal medicine and, very important, with psychiatry. After stabilization, when the patient is conscious, the person is evaluated by psychiatry to try to find the causes of the suicide attempt, or SA, as it is abbreviated in medicine.
After they managed to obtain information about the reason why this teenager had carried out this act against her person, it was learned that she, who is a dark-skinned person, saw some spots on her skin, whitish spots, and immediately went to the internet to look for possible causes of these spots, and what she found, according to what she thought she might have, was Vitiligo, an autoimmune disease that stains the skin all over the body, including the face.
Obviously this caused a great impact on her, and surely after seeing many people with this advanced disease, she thought "I can't look like this ", and decided to attempt against her life.
Vitiligo is an autoimmune disease that produces a progressive depigmentation of the skin until it can practically affect the entire body including the face, you can imagine that this disease has very strong psychological effects in both adolescents and adults, she did not know what to do and needed to end this suffering she had.
What always goes hand in hand with the treatment of this disease is, apart from the skin treatment, psychological care, which is very necessary.
She was also assessed by dermatology, once they knew the reason why she had attempted suicide, they analyzed the whitish spots and determined that what she had was a parasitic infection called Ptyriasis Versicolor which also produces a symptomatology of depigmentation in the skin and is easily solved with ketoconazole cream and in a few weeks this problem will have disappeared.
It is in this way that many people fall into a big mistake self-diagnosing and self-medicating, one can get very complex situations such as suicide attempts by people who instead of going to a qualified personnel to reach diagnoses, end up consulting the internet and generally what they get is the worst thing that could happen to them and the worst thing is that they take it as if it were an absolute truth, which leads to bad decisions.
What I am telling you is an event that happened in a TV series, but I can attest that in real life these things happen very often, unfortunately.
In short, the best thing to do is to consult a doctor in case of any situation that worries us.
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