Suicide at any age…an onion approach!

Every day brings on a different phone call and a different situation.  Todays’ call was from a sister who is also a daughter dealing with the grief of a suicide in the family and wanting to help her parents from a distance seeing that the person who took his life, her brother, lived with her parents.

Through talking, listening, and understanding how hard this is, it was about looking at the situation and identifying the present needs and the long term needs.  Would an intervention with a social worker and/ or a psychologist help her parents deal with the grief? What about hiring someone who could come into the house to provide assistance for one of the parents while the other could step away from the house, gain some breathing space, and start the healing process? What about in the long run: would moving be a better option to avoid seeing and remembering their son’s pain in the house all the time?

None of these questions nor the whole conversation was easy as it brought up emotions on my part and obviously on the daughters (sisters) part.  This is all about real life and the situations we have to deal with.  Looking back on that conversation, I see it as an ‘onion’ approach  where you have to peel one layer back at a time to see what the options are on one level, pause, then proceed to the next level and break it down that way.  This helps gain perspective on the whole situation, because otherwise it is all too overwhelming. The ‘onion’ approach could also work the same way when implementing the solutions, layer by layer.

So often I speak or sit down with seniors and they share with me that they would like to die, that they feel they “have been forgotten here on earth”.  They are tired, or sad that they are living a loss of autonomy, or feel they have done all they can do.  I understand that.  I empathize with them and try to help them see the beauty that surrounds them.  This (to me) is different than the thought of suicide, because they have often not planned out how to take their own lives. They are simply sharing how they feel at this stage in their lives.

On the other hand when someone talks of taking their own life, it requires, in my eyes, a specialized intervention.  I had a client once tell me that she had planned her suicide and that she would take her cute little sports car and create an accident the next time she saw a nice big white truck. That needed an intervention, because someone else’s life was involved. I needed help with this situation. I spoke with her family, and to my surprise, they were unaware of these thoughts. I also spoke with the suicide hotline. The funny thing is that when I called the hotline, they thought I was the one who wanted to commit suicide, so it took them a while to understand that I was calling to help someone else. (That gave me a good laugh when I hung up!) They did a good job and guided me toward the steps to take with my client.

Suicide is a big subject and affects life in many different ways, at all ages, from dismantling a family to even perhaps involving an innocent bystander.  There are people to talk to, telephone help lines, psychologists, social workers and/or friends.  My daughter spoke to a friend about an attempted suicide in our family and she was surprised (but at the same time comforted) to find out that her friend had also had a suicide in her family. It gave them common grounds and they understood each other that much more.

There should be no taboo subject in this short life of ours, please talk about it. Go one layer at a time just like an onion!