After Suicide

John H. Hewett

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 1980
• Print ISBN: 9780664242961
• eBook ISBN: 9781611644838
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

This constructive guide offers much-needed information and clinically-tested advice for those struggling to cope in the aftermath of a suicide. Written in clear language, this book presents the facts and demonstrates how to deal with feelings of guilt, anger, bewilderment, and shame. Also included is an anniversary memorial service that enables family members to recommit themselves to life.

1. Getting the Facts Straight

The silently awkward aftermath of suicide is often churned up by a vague, shadowy, threatening fear of the unknown. Questions plague you and your family: Why did she do it? What could have made him so depressed? What will happen to the children? Why didn’t I prevent it? What was be thinking about? Didn’t she love us enough to spare us this agony? What on earth does this suicide note mean?

Fear can grip you with strong, unyielding clutches. It threatens to heighten your anxiety and emotionally disable you. You can begin to face it. You must meet “the enemy” face to face. You can confront this gnawing sense of panic by getting the facts straight about suicide—finding out the whats, hows, whys, and wherefores. You will put some of these questions to rest. Thus you will protect yourself against the avalanche of half-truths, cultural myths, and superstitions that rain down in the aftermath.

Like any profoundly mysterious event, suicide has acquired a mythology all its own. This chapter will help you debunk some of those myths. You can bring the subject of suicide into the clear light of day and begin to learn about the tragedy that has overtaken your family. Once you begin to learn, you can begin to heal. Know the truth about suicide—it is essential to your recovery. That means getting the facts straight.

A LONG LOOK BACKWARD

You are going to feel a constant temptation to take a short backward look. Take a long one instead. People have been purposely taking their lives for thousands of years. Suicide shows up in all kinds of societies and throughout every historical epoch. It is as ancient as humanity itself. It occurred among the ancient Hebrews. The Greeks and Romans also were plagued with the problem of self-destruction. They held a hard-line position opposing it, except for the Stoics and Epicureans, who adopted a softer approach. The early Christian church was forced to take stern measures to deal with the epidemic of suicides that took place. So many believers were eager to gain heavenly glory that martyrdoms became commonplace. Augustine, and later Thomas Aquinas, labeled suicide a mortal sin equivalent to murder. With a few exceptions, they gave the church’s sanction to the civil laws against the act.

The attitude of condemnation did not ease until the period of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Then philosophers like Hume and Voltaire began to stress the primacy of individual freedom and the consequent “right” to suicide. A huge mass of legal punishments that had accumulated over the centuries stood in their way. Legal taboos compounded the private grief of suicide survivors. They were afflicted by brutal cultural rituals and religious stigma. For centuries, the act of suicide was met by stiff and rigid punishment. All property belonging to the victim was forfeited to the state. The surviving family was left homeless and destitute. Burial in consecrated ground was refused by the church. The body was frequently maimed and desecrated in acts of unspeakable violence. Families were socially “branded.” They were often forced to move from their communities in order to retain their own sanity.

Gradually the laws began to ease, under the influence of both the learned people and the church. You can begin to be thankful that, in some ways, we humans are at last becoming more humane. Currently, none of the few remaining laws against attempted suicide are being enforced. No legal punishment exists for the families of suicide victims. The emphasis in this country has shifted from viewing suicide as a crime to seeing it as a sickness. Thus we see a widespread intensification of effort for suicide prevention. The potential suicide is seen as an object of concern and medical intervention rather than as a potential felon.

Unfortunately, this more compassionate approach to the problem has largely overlooked the families of suicidal individuals. There are few hot lines to call after the suicide has happened! The coroner’s inquest and the autopsy are usually thought to be the only necessary follow-up procedures. Your family is quickly forgotten. That’s why this book has been written. I want to help you take your place in the company of people who have been hit with the blow of suicide and still survived. You are not alone. A great deal can be done to help you in your own process of getting yourself back together again. Millions have come through this crisis, and you can as well. My hope is that this volume can minister to you in both fact and feeling. We will look at feelings in the remainder of the book. But first we will check out the data on the subject.

SUICIDE STATISTICS

Actor Jack Webb will forever be remembered for his legendary Dragnet character, Sgt. Joe Friday. This deadpan, “strictly business” detective always wanted “just the facts, Ma’am.” For the families of suicide victims, the Joe Friday approach to the tragedy can be an initial move toward emotional recovery. The bereavement of survivors like yourself often becomes dangerously harmful if the persistent fears of the unknown “enemy” aren’t dispelled by the assurance of accurate information. Such fears are often fueled by varieties of shared misinformation and all-too-common knowledge, as well as the severe emotional aftershock of the suicide itself. A first step toward recovery is unlearning what is not so.

You have a right to know the truth about the suicide that happened to your family. You can place that knowledge in healthy perspective by learning the available details about suicide in general. Dependable information needs to be secured from competent professionals, not from uninformed friends or backyard philosophers. What follows are “just the facts.” I hope they will speak knowledge and the assurance of truth into the silently fearful aftermath of suicide.

No one knows precisely how many persons choose to end their lives each year. Official suicide statistics are notoriously unreliable. They are unreliable because thousands of suicides go unreported every year. If you question why accurate data cannot be accumulated on the prevalence of suicide in this country, several reasons can be readily identified. First, families often go to great lengths to suppress the fact of suicide. They fear the resulting social stigma. Perhaps they are concerned to preserve life insurance claims that might otherwise be declared invalid. Many factors prompt secrecy among surviving families. Second, methods of reporting suicides are inconsistent from region to region. One California coroner would declare a death to be self-inflicted only if a suicide note was found! Third, 15 to 20 percent of investigated deaths are ambiguous, with causes usually ruled either accident or suicide. These deaths are quite difficult to identify. They include such equivocal causes as single-car crashes, drownings, and wounds sustained during hunting and gun-cleaning “accidents.” Fourth, our country contains a huge class of persons who knowingly hasten or cause their own deaths through chronic alcohol or drug abuse, unnecessary risk-taking, and even the initiation of their own murders. Death certificates would not list any of these as suicidal deaths, but often they are clear cases of willful self-destruction.

The latest reports of the United States Public Health Service on “officially” designated suicides indicate that 28,000–30,000 Americans purposely take their lives each year. Experts claim that the actual total is closer to three times that, with suicide attempts approaching eight to ten times the completed rate. Possibly as many as one million people attempt suicide in this country each year. These statistics indicate that millions of Americans alive today have on at least one occasion attempted to take their own lives. As many as 90,000–100,000 persons probably complete suicide each year in this country. If we assume a realistic average of five family members for each suicidal death, then our nation includes 150,000–500,000 suicide survivors involved in “postvention” at any one time. And those are only members of the immediate family! Clearly, you are not alone in your unique grief situation.

Suicide is a public health crisis. It ranks among the top ten causes of death among American adults. It is currently the second highest cause of death among adolescents and children, surpassed only by accidents. These self-inflicted deaths cost our cities and states billions of dollars annually in emergency facilities, hospitalization, and loss of income. More Americans die at their own hands than are killed in acts of homicide. For those over sixty-five, suicide is a major killer. Though these older adults comprise only 10 percent of the total population, they account for 25 percent of all the reported suicides each year. Failing health, the shrinking value of a fixed income, and stifling loneliness often combine to make suicide an alluring alternative to our nation’s elderly.

Although women attempt suicide three times as frequently as men, men complete suicide three times as often as women. Though some recent evidence points to a change in this ratio toward a more equal proportion between the sexes, the fact remains that men do follow through on their destructive intentions more seriously than do women.

White-collar professionals in leadership positions are greater risks than blue-collar laborers and farmers. Among professionals, medical doctors (especially psychiatrists) are thought to kill themselves at a much higher rate than others, with female physicians more vulnerable than their male colleagues. Such data remains in question at present, with research studies supporting both sides of the debate.

Divorced persons take their lives more often than singles; single individuals complete suicide more often than married persons.

The suicide rate of white Americans has historically out numbered that of blacks, but the black rate is rising. American Indians have an unusually high suicide rate. This may date from the inclusion of suicide in primitive tribal rituals, as with the Navajo, who prescribed suicide as punishment for breaking a taboo.

Suicide rates increase geographically as you move from east to west, with much higher totals in cities than in rural areas. The mountain and Pacific states report the highest national incidence of suicide. The “fever spots” in the West are Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. It should not be surprising that the suicidal People’s Temple cult was centered in San Francisco; that city is the “suicide capital” of the nation, with a rate two and a half times the national average. Other high-risk areas in this country include Miami and St. Petersburg, the Florida geriatric centers, where rates approach twice the national average.

April and May are the peak months for suicides. Evidently this reflects the suicidal person’s despair and anxiety, which seem so totally at odds with the rebirth of spring and the reminder of things fresh and new. Except for a brief upsurge during the stressful Christmas season, the rate decreases in winter, when the weather more accurately reflects the victim’s mood.

A suicide is more likely to occur at home during the early morning and early evening hours. It happens most often on Friday and Monday, when the pressures of another lonely weekend or a dreaded workweek loom largest.

Guns and explosives are the most common methods used in self-inflicted death. Lethal overdoses of medication are the second choice. Men tend toward the more violent means of suicide, while women usually choose the less often lethal path of the drug overdose. The grim list of other suicidal methods defies the imagination. Such methods break the boundaries of the bizarre, as human beings take their lives by a limitless variety of means.

Suicide rates plummet during wartime, but rise sharply during periods of severe economic crisis and high unemployment. This was shown in America during the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

Currently, in its rate of reported suicides, the United States ranks in about the middle of the list of countries reporting to the United Nations. Austria, West Germany, Hungary, Japan, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland report significantly higher rates than ours. Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain indicate far fewer suicides than are reported by the United States.

UNLEARNING WHAT IS NOT SO ABOUT SUICIDE

A learned professor of mine once remarked that he knew of nothing more frightening than ignorance in action. Such a judgment certainly applies to the abundance of superstitious fallacies and cultural fantasies that have grown up around the problem of suicide.

You may have already discovered that some people are quick to offer advice to those whom they perceive as helpless. They will readily dispense timeworn cliches about your situation with little tact and even less forethought. They give you a mishmash of fables and fantasies that have been proved wrong. In unlearning things that are not so, you defuse the potentially explosive effects of these myths. Fantasies and facts are offered here with the hope that this information will assist you and your family in separating truth from fiction.

Myth: “People who talk about killing themselves never do.”

Fact: Fully 80 percent of all completed suicides do in fact speak of their intentions beforehand. Sometimes they threaten or hint of suicide until those around them grow weary of the persistent “promises.” Or, they confide in one or two close friends, or perhaps their physicians or ministers. Suicide hot lines all across the country report thousands upon thousands of calls each year, which certainly indicate that suicidal persons do indeed want to talk about their despair and feelings of panic. As you reflect upon the last months and weeks before the suicide in your family, you may begin to recall the scattered hints and vague allusions given out by the victim. Certainly you remember the obvious threats and cries for help if they were given.

Myth: “Suicide usually happens without warning, ‘on the spur of the moment.’”

Fact: This misconception is closely tied with the first, in the attempt to portray suicide as but another type of sudden death. It is commonly bandied about in informal discussions, and often used to give consolation to the grieving family—the “you had no way of knowing” approach. You do not derive solace from this kind of misinformation unless it actually was impossible for you to know about the impending suicide. For example, you may have been hundreds of miles away at the time. Research shows that suicidal individuals offer many clues and warnings, not all of which are verbal, regarding the growing intention to self-destruct. Very few suicides ever happen “out of the blue.” What appears to be the result of a sudden, momentary impulse usually is the culmination of a long history of crises and traumas within the victim’s life. Clues are often given to family and friends by an increase in accidents and unnecessary risk-taking, or by a marked change in eating, sleeping, or sexual activity.

Perhaps your family member truly did complete suicide totally without warning. You truthfully had no way of knowing. This does happen when family members are separated by time and distance, but such instances do not validate this second myth. If your family member did decide to die “on the spur of the moment,” try to accept that as a rare occurrence. Resist the compulsion toward self-torment and blame. Incredible suicides such as these render all statistics irrelevant.

Myth: “All persons who attempt suicide are fully intent on dying.”

Fact: Suicide attempts and suicidal “gestures” outnumber completed suicides by as much as ten to one. This illustrates the suicidal person’s mixed motives and em...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Getting The Facts Straight
• 2. Coping With Acute Grief: What To Expect
• 3. A Family Of Survivors
• 4. Helping Your Children In The Aftermath
• 5. Suicide And Your Faith
• 6. Living As A Suicide Survivor
• 7. Anniversary Memorial Service
• For Further Reading