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U of PORTLAND STUDENTS STEADFAST IN FACING HARSH REALITY OF SUICIDE

1/31/2016

Rev. Mark DeMott holds a picture of Michael Eberitzsch II during a memorial service at the University of Portland last March. (Photo by David DiLoreto, The Beacon)

An article in a recent issue of the University of Portland campus newspaper,The Beacon, introduced me to a story about a death by suicide that was stigmatized and how the effects of stigma are unfolding in real time -- and hopefully about how stigma is being overcome.

The article, by UP student Logan Crabtree, caught my eye because he tells of founding, with fellow student Jesse Dunn, an Active Minds chapter at UP "following the suicide of our friend Mike" -- and I am always moved when, in the aftermath of suicide, survivors like Crabtee and Dunn take action to improve mental health resources and services in their community.

I was also touched by Crabtree's frankness about the struggles of the new chapter, including the impact that another student's suicide had on him, only nine months after the death of Michael Eberitzsch II:

We were devastated by the news of Conner Hall’s suicide ... For me his death felt like a personal failure. I spent weeks questioning and reviewing every event, article and Facebook post we had made [during the start-up of Active Minds]. What else could we have done? Why did this happen? What else can we do?

I sympathized with Crabtree regarding his feeling of personal failure, which I believe everyone involved in suicide prevention has grappled with, each of us in our own way -- and I was curious about what was happening at UP. An Internet search led me to the backstory, which is, at turns, both troubling and hopeful -- just as facing the harsh reality of suicide often is.

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PARADOX REQUIRES CAREFUL SCRUTINY OF HELP FOR SUICIDE BEREAVED

5/18/2015

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By Franklin Cook

A recent blog post on Grief After Suicide argues (convincingly, I hope) that suicide bereavement is unique because suicide itself is a unique way to die. Yet, at the same time, an abundance of research -- not to mention the universality of the human experience of grief -- points to a paradox, namely, that all bereavement over the death of a loved one shares a great deal in common. In other words, grief after suicide is, simultaneously, both different than and similar to bereavement following other means of death.

Understanding and accounting for this paradox is important because, as is stated in recently released national guidelines on responding to suicide, created by the Survivors of Suicide Loss Task Force of the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention:*

Suicide grief support is an emerging field of practice poised to gain strength from newer understandings of bereavement adaptation in thanatology [the study of death and bereavement].

This emerging field would benefit tremendously from looking more closely at -- and acting more collaboratively with -- the field of grief counseling (as well as other fields, such as traumatology, mental health crisis response, and disaster response). Doing so would enrich and strengthen suicide grief support through the application of evidence-based and promising practices that are already proving to be effective with a variety of bereaved people. Taking this multi-disciplinary approach would prevent responses to suicide grief from evolving based on narrow or monolithic ideas centered primarily around what is unique about suicide bereavement.

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GROUNDBREAKING GUIDELINES ADDRESS GRIEF, TRAUMA, DISTRESS OF SUICIDE LOSS

4/20/2015

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By Franklin Cook

A historic document, Responding to Grief, Trauma, and Distress After a Suicide: U.S. National Guidelines, was announced earlier this month at the Association for Death Education and Counseling conference in San Antonio and at the American Association of Suicidology conference in Atlanta. The Grief After Suicide blog -- in an upcoming series of posts -- will cover a number of ways that this groundbreaking document is paving the way for reinventing postvention in America. For instance, the guidelines:

• Summarize research evidence showing that exposure to suicide unquestionably increases the chances that those exposed -- perhaps especially the bereaved -- are at higher risk for suicide as well as for numerous, sometimes debilitating mental health conditions
• Highlight the effects of a fatality on people beyond family members of the deceased, including friends, first responders, clinicians, colleagues, and others (even entire communities) who may require support in the wake of a suicide
• Describe a new framework for classifying people who experience a suicide (Exposed, Affected, Short-Term Bereaved, and Long-Term Bereaved) that will help focus research and guide the development of programs and services to meet the unique needs of specific populations (see the graphic at bit.ly/continuummodel)
• Advocate for a systems approach, through organizing interventions into three separate, overlapping categories:
    • Immediate Response: Based on mental-health crisis and disaster response principles
    • Support: From the familial, peer, faith-based, and community resources that help the bereaved cope with a death
    • Treatment: By licensed clinicians for conditions such as PTSD, Depression, and Complicated Grief
• Argue that suicide bereavement is unique because death by suicide is unique (i.e., it involves questions about the deceased's volition, the effects of trauma, the degree that suicide is preventable, and the role of stigma in people's treatment of the deceased and the bereaved)
• Present an outline of the research needed to expand and enrich what is known about suicide bereavement and other effects of suicide (which will lead to the development of evidence-based practices in suicide postvention)
• Assert that suicide grief support efforts ought to be informed by research and clinical advances over the past 20 years in the fields of bereavement support, traumatology, and crisis and disaster preparedness
• Include an appendix outlining numerous, practical resources for the suicide bereaved and those who care for them (please link to the expanded, online version of the resource clearinghouse)

An excerpt of the guidelines (Table of Contents, Executive Summary, Acknowledgements, Preface) is available at bit.ly/excerptsosl, and the complete document is available at bit.ly/respondingsuicide. The guidelines were created by the Survivors of Suicide Loss Task Force of the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention.

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GRIEF, TRAUMA OF SUICIDE TOUCH PEOPLE NEAR AND FAR FROM THE DECEASED

3/13/2014

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In "Suicide by Train: Shared Tragedies Upend String of Lives," Orange Country Register reporters Keith Sharon and Greg Hardesty have given us an intimate look at the circle of people affected when someone dies by suicide.

The story -- of a middle-aged man's suicide on a stretch of track in Southern California -- gives voice to those bereaved and shocked and debilitated by the death, the man's wife and friends, a passer-by who witnessed the suicide, train engineers, and a father who faced an irony too horrible for him to comprehend or assimilate.

It is a story that should be read from beginning to end without much of a hint about its details, so I'll share only a glimpse of the man's widow and his father:

"As I was driving in the rain to the hotel [after being told of the suicide], my first thought was that this is more than I will ever be able to handle," she said. "I contemplated slamming my car into the light pole ahead."

A year later, she has taken up "public speaking, going to high schools and anyone who would listen to her talk about mental health and how to handle depression." She reports, though, that her husband's father "has never been the same":

He's fallen twice in recent months, and he was unable to continue tending to his goats, so he sold the farm. He cut off his phone service.

"Sold the farm": What an awful but apt description of bottomless grief.

This story about suicide by train illustrates the long reach of suicide's aftermath in all cases, showing how deeply it touches even those one might not expect, an ex-girlfriend who relapses on alcohol and a stranger who needs trauma therapy -- people who come face-to-face with victims in their final moments. Suicide, we are reminded, wounds people near and far from the center of a deceased person's life, as tragedy reverberates outward from the scene of a person's death.

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SUICIDE THROWS FAMILIES INTO GRIEF, COMMUNITIES INTO SHOCK

7/25/2013

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In her story "A Wound that Never Heals," reporter Madeline Novey of the Fort Collins Coloradoan shows how youth suicide affects families and also reverberates throughout a community. (See below for links to Novey's series of related articles.)

The story focuses on the parents of two 16-year-olds, Caroline Phelan-Jones, who died by suicide in 2008, and Antonio Franco, who killed himself just eight months ago.

"I still wake up every morning and think: How is she gone?" [Caroline's] mother, Jane Phelan, said through tears earlier this spring. She had a letter she read at the memorial service clasped between trembling fingers. If something like this could happen to her daughter, "it could happen to anyone."

In his son's absence, [Antonio's father] thinks of pilots trained to rely on their gauges when storms cloud their vision. "In his torrent, in his thunderstorm, in his rainstorm, despite all his instruments, he made a decision that ended his life."

Larimer County has seen 26 suicides by people 18 or younger in the past decade, and a 15-year-old boy from Fort Collins died of suicide in neighboring Jackson County. The losses have touched the entire community.

"It is an incredible ripple effect," said Linda Maher, who started volunteering with the Alliance for Suicide Prevention of Larimer County 15 years ago to help her daughter, then a [Poudre School District] student, cope with the loss of her 12-year-old friend.

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U of PORTLAND STUDENTS STEADFAST IN FACING HARSH REALITY OF SUICIDE

PARADOX REQUIRES CAREFUL SCRUTINY OF HELP FOR SUICIDE BEREAVED

GROUNDBREAKING GUIDELINES ADDRESS GRIEF, TRAUMA, DISTRESS OF SUICIDE LOSS

GRIEF, TRAUMA OF SUICIDE TOUCH PEOPLE NEAR AND FAR FROM THE DECEASED

SUICIDE THROWS FAMILIES INTO GRIEF, COMMUNITIES INTO SHOCK

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