Unique Challenges Associated with Suicide Bereavement

National Suicide Prevention Week

Suicide survivors, or people who have lost a significant person in their lives to suicide, often face distinctive challenges in bereavement, including stigma, a lack of social support, and ruminations over why the person ended their life. 

Stigma and Lack of Social Support

Death by suicide is often stigmatized in many cultures to a point where people do not feel comfortable speaking openly about it. Suicide survivors commonly experience difficulty finding quality support from others. They may face insensitive, hurtful, or judgmental remarks directed towards them or the person who died. Close friends and family members may even distance themselves due to their own discomfort or not knowing how to help. It is common for suicide survivors to feel emotionally depleted from people asking how their loved one died or seeing awkward expressions on people’s faces when they tell them. Some may find themselves in the position of having to comfort others about the loss rather than having their grief tended to. Suicide survivors frequently feel alone in their experience, unsupported, and rejected by people they otherwise could rely on. These experiences can leave suicide survivors feeling incredibly isolated and overlooked. 

The Search for Meaning

In the midst of such profound grief and loneliness, it is not uncommon for survivors’ beliefs about the world to change, prompting them to grapple with questions about the meaning of life. 

After any significant loss, especially an unexpected one, people can find themselves without the same sense of purpose in life as they had before. Suicide survivors may scour their mind trying to make sense of it all, searching for reasons why their loved one died by suicide. They may feel responsible in a variety of ways – whether that be wishing they had reached out and checked in on them more, not argued with them as much, spent more time with them…the list goes on. Some people bereaved by suicide may be so consumed by feelings of guilt and shame that they are haunted by repetitive and circular thoughts about the death and deceased person. This form of relentless and fixated thinking is known as grief rumination. 

Some examples of common thoughts that suicide survivors may experience include:

My life is meaningless without them.

No one can understand my pain. 

What if I had noticed the signs? 

Why did this happen? 

I should be over this by now. 

Signs to Seek Professional Support

Although having these thoughts is a common part of the grief experience, sometimes they can take over and interfere with spending time with loved ones, work, valued activities, or living a life of meaning. Experiencing the suicide of a loved one can be traumatic and open survivors up to thoughts of self-blame and guilt or even traumatic imagery. Sometimes these complex thoughts and feelings can become overwhelming and may contribute to feelings of persistently intense and unabating grief or depression. For some, these ruminations, especially if they include self-blame, can contribute to the survivor also experiencing suicidal thoughts or behaviors. These are signs to seek out additional professional grief support.

Support Needs for Suicide Survivors

Given the scarcity of specialized professional support for suicide survivors, we are left with many questions about who is likely to need counseling support and how to best tailor care to the needs of suicide survivors. Therefore, learning more about the grief experiences of suicide survivors could inform better support for this population as they cope with inconceivable pain and suffering. 

Support Resources

One way to receive support during this time is to connect with other suicide survivors. There are many advocacy and support websites, this one included, that raise awareness about suicide, as well as provide a sense of community and hope, which are often essential during one’s grief experience. Below are available resources for suicide loss survivors: 

American Foundation for Suicide Prevention: https://afsp.org/find-a-support-group  

Alliance of Hope: https://allianceofhope.org/   

Friends for survival: https://friendsforsurvival.org/  

Suicide Awareness Voices of Education: https://save.org/what-we-do/grief-support/  

To learn more about rumination in the context of grief, as well as ways to cope with it, please see Neimeyer and colleagues (2021)’s work entitled “If only…”: Counterfactual thinking in bereavement. 

An Opportunity to Make a Difference

I am a clinical psychology doctoral student at the Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology and am assisting my research advisor, Dr. Kailey Roberts, with a study to develop a screening tool to help better identify individuals who might need professional support in bereavement. Ultimately, the goal is to have a tool that can be used in hospitals and clinics to guide the delivery of tailored bereavement support.     

If you are interested in learning more about the study and participating, you can read more below. 

Study Details

We are seeking individuals who are caregiving for someone with a life-limiting illness and those who have experienced a significant loss to any cause to participate in a research study through Yeshiva University. The purpose of the study is to develop a questionnaire to identify those who may be in need of caregiver or grief support in order to ultimately improve family-centered care in hospitals and clinics.

For caregivers and bereaved individuals who would like to contribute to our understanding of caregiving and bereavement, this is a way to make a difference.

If you would like to participate in our study, please fill out this confidential screener at https://yeshiva.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_dnJtxZtLyqmIglg

to determine if you are eligible. Participation in the study involves completing a survey that will take approximately 30-40 minutes. You will also be given the option to be contacted for two additional follow-up surveys. After completing each survey, you will be entered into a raffle for a chance to receive a gift card.

For more details, you can contact:

Grief, Loss and Meaning Research Lab at drrobertslab@gmail.com

References

Neimeyer, R. A., Pitcho-Prelorentzos, S., & Mahat-Shamir, M. (2021). "If only…": 

Counterfactual thinking in bereavement. Death studies, 45(9), 692–701. 

https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2019.1679959

Julia Kirsch, M.A.