SUICIDE SURVIVORS
Sylvie Rousset
In honoring loved ones to the loss of suicide. Being a suicide survivor, I have learned so much about this folklore group. Explore my work to understand what lies behind losing a loved one to suicide.
ABSTRACT
This picture was taken in a yearly event in support of suicide awareness and prevention. Suicide is complex. Suicide survivors’ recovery is also very complex. The stigma that lies behind suicide does not make it any easier on suicide survivors. Although nobody wants to be part of a suicide survivor group, many people end up joining one because of circumstances and their need to reach out to people like them for support and understanding. Suicide survivors’ groups become crucial to suicide survivors who are often misunderstood, misjudged, and rejected by society due to the stigma related to suicide.
MY STORY
This was a picture taken at a park in Los Angeles in memory of my husband Fabrice Blancot. My husband took his life in 2012. I will never forget that phone call from the detective, which marked a turning point in my life, as well as my daughter’s. In a glimpse of an eye, everything can change. I felt so alone and broken. The shock, denial, trauma, anger, guilt, grief, despair, and stigma are symptoms that suicide survivors go through. I am thankful for my sister who for the first time took me and my family, as well as friends in a public event called “Alive and Running” at the park in Los Angeles. This yearly event is organized by Didi Hirsch - Mental Health Services, and I am so thankful for them. Even though we did not know one another, we all had lost a loved one to suicide. We honored our loved ones by adding a picture of them with their name on a huge wall on which was inscribed “In memory of our loved ones.” We also all walked or ran in the names of our loved ones and to suicide prevention. This feeling of togetherness was the most healing. For once, we knew this place was safe for us to speak out. It also felt so good to be surrounded by people who shared the same experience than we did. Nothing was taboo anymore or disturbing. We even had smiles on our face. The intensity of this yearly event was so healing.
It is time to break the stigma!
THE AFTERMATH OF SUICIDE
It is recognized that the suicide phenomenon extends well beyond the person who died by suicide. Current estimations indicate that for each death by suicide, over 100 individuals are affected, with 25 of them being profoundly impacted and bereaved.
Bearing in mind that more than one million people worldwide die by suicide annually, the numbers of those intensely impacted in the community are exceedingly high.
Why are grieving suicide survivors considered a particular group?
Grief is the natural reaction to the loss of a significant one, comprehending emotional, psychological, physical, and behavioral responses to the death.
However, people grieving suicide also present an important component of shock and possible trauma, as well as feelings of abandonment, rejection, unacceptance, and shame related to the circumstances of death. The normative process of grief usually evolves from acute to integrated, being individuals able to return to their daily living and functional level. When some internal or external factor interferes with this process, complicated grief may occur. It has been shown that complicated grief is more frequent in suicide survivors than in people grieving other causes of death.
Furthermore, feelings of guilt and blame may be linked to a quest to understand why the suicide occurred. Bereaved people may blame themselves for contributing to the death. Failure to recognize mental illness or its severity may be an added factor. Guilt and shame are, understandably, likely to be particularly prominent where the suicide of a son or daughter has occurred.
Awareness of the generally negative reaction of the community to suicide compared with other types of death may compound the sense of stigma. The sense of rejection associated with bereavement by suicide may increase vulnerability.
The problems faced by many individuals bereaved by suicide indicate that help is often needed.
Common Factors in Suicide Survivors:
Common suicide survivors’ symptoms or feelings:
Depression
Anxiety
Grief
Complicated Grief
Posttraumatic social disorder (PTSD)
Anger
Guilt
Blame
Shame
Abandonment
Social stigma
Rejection
Suicidal behaviors
Although suicide is an intensely private act, its social impact is profound.
Suicide shows a contempt for society. It is rude. This most individualistic of all actions disturbs society profoundly.
Suicide is seen as an affront to society – an action that devaluates human existence. Family, friends, and community are stigmatized through their association with the suicide and are enveloped in an aura of shame.
According to experts on the study of suicide, the legal absurdities surrounding the act have their basis in primitive superstitions and taboos. The primitive fear that the ghost of a suicide would return to haunt its enemies is reflected in the mutilation of corpses and their interment proceedings for suicide.
With the coming of Christianity, suicide is a flagrant denial of divine authority and will and is the worst of all possible sins because repentance is impossible.
To the normal person suicide seems too dreadful and senseless to be conceivable. There also seems to be a taboo on the serious discussion of it.
On the other hand:
Existential philosophers, while not advocating suicide, see it as an inherent individual right and the ultimate expression of liberty.
Suicide is an intensely individual act. “To be or not to be, the self and everything else, we must choose.”
To the modern medical man, suicide is not, however, a matter of choice, nor is it something that can necessarily be prevented by psychotherapy. The man who takes its own life is the victim of an intrapsychic crisis of depression which has resulted from a metabolic malfunction beyond its control.
How has the stigma on suicide been translated into my own experience as a suicide survivor?
I have been told by a very religious woman that my husband was in hell.
I have been told that I should not be grieving because his act was so selfish.
People who lose their loved ones to suicide are not treated the same way than people who lose their loved ones to any kind of other death. I can recall the support that my best friend had from my daughter’s school when she lost her husband to cancer. People brought her food every day, flowers, and made sure to collect gift cards, as well as donations for her family. In comparison to my husband’s death, I did not get any support from my daughter’s school, not even a condolence card. Her school adopted my family though for Christmas, meaning that we received many Christmas gifts from her school, which was very pleasant in a time of family crisis. The outside support was still delayed. The stigma on suicide is huge and is reflected in the way people interact with suicide survivors. Suicide survivors have the tendency to feel very abandoned and rejected by society at first.
The consequences of suicide survivors due to the stigma on suicide:
As consequences of the stigma from society on suicide, suicide survivors tend to detach themselves from non-suicide survivors. At least, we quickly understand that it is best not to open up to non-suicide survivors about our personal experience until we become strong enough to fight the stigma on suicide. Concealment and revelation often alternate in the inversion of social personhood. Opposed, yet complementary, their relationship encompasses a recurrent mechanism of the deconstruction and reconstruction of social order. I quickly learned for instance not to mention the way my husband died. I would just mention that my husband passed away to avoid the stigma associated with suicide. I also quickly sought for online suicide survivors’ groups for comfort only to find that what I was going through on an internal and social level was common factors of suicide survivors. From that point on, I started identifying myself more with suicide survivors than any other kinds of groups of people. Even among our suicide survivor groups, we started to make the distinction between us (suicide survivors) and them (the non-suicide survivors). Group identity depends not only on shared communication within the group but also on interaction with other groups, which helps define and reinforce a sense of groupness. Both insiders and outsiders define or delineate a group. The esoteric-exoteric factors are important in understanding groups, because sometimes groups base a lot of their folklore (and thus their identity) on presenting themselves in relation to other groups. This may occur in order to combat stereotypes. I liked the esoteric factors of suicide survivor groups and the fact that they were closed groups because we did not have to deal with the exoteric stigma on suicide. Yet, we would point it out within our discussions because we were tired of dealing with this stigma. These online support groups felt very safe and healing to me. I became friends with many suicide survivors.
MY ADVICES:
With the epidemic of Covid-19, more and more people are prone to committing suicide. These recent years, there has also been an increase of suicides among teenagers. Breaking the stigma on suicides will help suicide survivors in their own journey to recovery as suicide survivors need even more support than others.
Simple phrases from suicide survivors that helped me during my recovery and that become crucial in suicide survivors’ daily journey.
Be kind to yourself!
Listen to yourself!
Be patient with yourself!
Each little step counts!
Take the time to grieve!
There is no time limit on grieving!
You do not have to be strong!
You are not alone!
Ask for help!
Join online suicide survivors' support groups!
Life will get better!
Once you will be ready, you will open up and break the stigma!
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beardsley, John. “Is Anybody Out There?” Landscape Architecture 86, no. 3 (1996): 156–155. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44671745.
Handelman, Don. 1984. “Inside-Out, Outside-In: Concealment and Revelation in Newfoundland Christmas Mumming.” The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Hawton, Keith, and Sue Simkin. 2003. “Helping People Bereaved by Suicide: Their Needs May Require Special Attention.” BMJ: British Medical Journal 327, no. 7408: 177–78. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25455068.
Noon, Georgia. “On Suicide.” Journal of the History of Ideas 39, no. 3 (1978): 371–86. https://doi.org/10.2307/2709383.
Pinto S, Soares J, Silva A, Curral R and Coelho R. 2020. “Covid-19 Suicide Survivors – A Hidden Grieving Population.” Front. Psychiatry 11: 626807. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2020.626807
Sims, Martha, and Stephens, Martine. 2011. Living Folklore, 2nd Edition: An Introduction to the Study of People and Their Traditions. Logan: Utah State University Press.