Suicide is a Serious Public Health Issue

Suicide is a serious global public health concern; 700,000 people die from suicide every year. Suicide is also the fourth leading cause of death for young people between 15 and 19 years old. Suicide is also a significant issue in this region, with the Pan American Health Organisation estimating that 65,000 people in the Americas die from suicide annually.

Suicide Survivor’s Experiences are Complex

While the reasons behind someone committing suicide are complex, the traumatic impact suicide has on immediate relatives, friends, colleagues, and community members is more straightforward. Collectively, these persons can be viewed as survivors. Unfortunately, a survivor’s experience of losing someone to suicide is complicated by various factors, including the blame, stigma, and secrecy that often accompanies a suicide-related death.

Suicide is Traumatic

We have had the opportunity to work with several families and organisations affected by suicide. What is always clear is the palpable shock and grief of those who have survived. Many survivors experience traumatic stress symptoms, including flashbacks, emotional flooding, and numbness. These traumatic reactions are only exacerbated for people who might have found the body or have to deal directly with the aftermath of the person’s death. Suicide is often alarming because many people do not expect their loved ones, friends, or colleagues to kill themselves.

Avoid Blame

As people engage in sense-making around why the person they knew committed suicide, it is often inevitable that people will begin to blame or even take responsibility for the person’s death. While accountability makes sense and is functional, and can even be preventative for future suicide deaths, blame is problematic and only exacerbates people’s feelings of grief. Blame is also a divider and disconnects people in families and other social groups so they cannot support each other.

When we have worked with people affected by suicide, we often talk about slowing down and being present with their feelings and each other. Knowing someone else is experiencing similar feelings is a powerful form of validation and helps people recognise that they are not alone regarding the emotions they are experiencing. Staying in the here and now also prevents people from jumping back and forth in their minds, which often precipitates blaming.

We also often talk about the uselessness of casting blame, how blame gets people defensive and angry, and how these emotions might prevent people from asking for and securing support.

Reduce Stigma

Suicide is deeply stigmatised, particularly in the Western world. This stigma is linked to religious traditions, particularly Christianity since Christianity admonishes believers not to commit suicide. Because of the pervasiveness of these religious beliefs, even for people who do not necessarily see themselves as formally religious, there is a significant amount of stigma connected to suicide-related deaths. In addition, this stigma often stops people from being open about the suicide-related death of relatives, friends, or colleagues.

Stigma often shrouds suicide survivorship in secrecy. The family therapy research is clear about the destructive nature of secrets in families, but the significance of secrets in more extensive systems like organisations and communities is also essential. Secrets only complicate the nature of grieving, making it difficult to talk about suicide deaths, cutting people away from valuable information that can help them make sense of the death, and cutting people off from significant supportive resources.

Some examples we have often seen of secrecy in families are family members cutting off children from information about the death of their loved ones. While adults should share age-appropriate information and explain suicide so that children can understand, secrecy or hiding the actual cause of their loved one’s death can forestall the opportunity for young people to also engage in the grieving process. Furthermore, when young people are cut off from information, it also makes it more difficult for them to secure assistance from the adults in the family.

Secrecy also often extends to the community, and many families might be wary of sharing the cause of the death of their relative with friends, workmates, and community members. The result is often awkward conversations, hushes, and silence between relatives and persons outside the family system. Yet that person who died from suicide might have had various relationships beyond those in the family sphere. Families also are part of larger communities, and secrecy means that opportunities for support are significantly reduced. The fact is that there is power in shared suffering, particularly in small communities where a variety of people are affected by a suicide death, and people can grieve and support each other.

Recovery Strategies

Suicides are traumatic events affecting various people and systems, including families, workplaces, and friendship networks; blame, stigma, and secrecy will only exacerbate the trauma of the event. Conversely, persons can accelerate grieving and reduce traumatic stress by:

1. Avoiding blaming self or others for the suicide death,

2. Staying in the here and now and accepting and validating feelings,

3. Challenging suicide-related stigma, and

4. Avoiding secrets and talking openly about the suicide death