A deeper look into suicide
FAIRLAND – It is estimated that for every suicide, six people closely associated with the suicide victim are affected.
Fairland Community Policing Forum (CPF) Victim Support Unit member Charmaine Stainton writes:
It is natural for people to think about death, after all, death is a process of life and a reality we will all need to face at some point in our lives. Yet, suicidal thinking, known as suicide ideation, is somewhat different. Suicide ideation mostly stems from ongoing emotional pain where feelings of hopelessness, sadness, and an inability of knowing how to cope with life circumstances becomes too much to bear.
Suicidal ideation can range from thoughts of being ‘better off dead’ to creating a detailed plan. People who feel suicidal are struggling to cope with their life situation and are expressing a desperate need to bring an end to their difficulties. The easy and most frequent explanation for suicide is that people who kill themselves are suffering from a mental disorder. This explanation is too simplistic in that suicide has many causes and that people kill themselves for many different reasons.
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It is estimated that for every suicide, six people closely associated with the suicide victim are affected. Suicide loss survivors are left with their grief, and struggle to understand why it happened. Death by suicide is sudden, sometimes violent, and usually unexpected. Those left behind may have recurring thoughts of the death and its circumstances, replaying the final moments over and over in an effort to understand — or simply because they cannot get the thoughts out of their head.
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Suicide grief is different to murder grief. After a murder, survivors can direct their anger at the perpetrator. In a suicide, the victim is the perpetrator, so there is a confusing clash of emotions. On one hand, a person who dies by suicide may appear to be a victim of mental illness or intolerable circumstances. On the other hand, the act may seem like an assault on or rejection of those left behind. Feelings of anger, rejection, and abandonment may occur after a suicide and are especially intense and difficult to process.
Witness survivors of suicide loss, who have witnessed a suicide death by either observing the suicide, finding the deceased’s body after the fact, or have heard or read graphic details regarding the death may experience shock, disbelief, numbness, detachment or the onset of sudden physical symptoms related to a stress disorder. While not everyone experiences trauma equally or experiences the same symptoms, some people experience intense anxiety, guilt, depression or post traumatic stress.
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