Often, adults agonize over what to tell children when somebody in the child’s family dies by suicide. The question becomes even more painful when the person who dies by suicide is a young child’s mother or father. But the suicide of a beloved sibling, aunt, uncle, grandparent or other person in the family’s life can also be devastating.
Some parents or other family members may want to hide the cause of death. They want to protect children – protect them from blaming themselves and from asking the same devastating questions that often plague adult survivors of suicide: Why did they leave me? Why wasn’t I a good enough reason to stay alive? What could I have done differently?
How Hiding Suicide Can Hurt Children
Family members who cover up a suicide have good intentions, but their secrecy and deception might cause unintentional harm. By hiding suicide, adults risk invalidating children’s reality, perpetuating the stigma of suicide, and leaving children alone with a truth that they may discover elsewhere, like from other kids in the neighborhood.
For these reasons, and more, mental health professionals and many survivors of suicide themselves widely agree that children should be told the truth, even though the truth is painful. Michael F. Myers, a psychiatrist, and Carla Fine, both of whom are survivors of suicide, state:
With children, honesty about suicide is not only the best policy, it is the only policy. You must tell your children the truth in an age-appropriate manner from the beginning, no matter how young they are.
Children are exquisitely sensitive to their environments. In cases where adults withhold the truth, children may sense that they are being lied to, adding to feelings of betrayal and grief.
As I noted in another post on keeping suicide secret, children might already know more than the adults around them think. I once read a devastating account about Frank Campbell, PhD, executive director of a crisis intervention center in Louisiana. This story comes from the excellent book for suicide survivors, Touched by Suicide: Hope and Healing After Loss:
A 5-year-old boy’s mother came to Dr. Campbell seeking grief counseling for her son. The boy’s father had died by suicide. The mother insisted that Dr. Campbell not tell her son that his father had died by suicide. She said she needed to protect him. Dr. Campbell reluctantly agreed.
When he met privately with the boy, the child told him his father had killed himself. He added: “But please don’t tell my mommy,” the boy entreated. “She thinks my daddy died in a car accident.”
And there’s another point I made in that post that bears repeating:
Children figure things out, whether now or later. If suicide is kept secret, one of many messages children might absorb is that suicide is so shameful that it has to be denied.
Telling Children the Truth about Suicide
Talking truthfully to children about suicide also means giving the full context of why suicide occurs – because a person’s mind is is overwhelmed with sickness, stress, pain, or something else out of the ordinary. And the condition or situation causes them to make sad, painful decisions that they wouldn’t otherwise make.
Suicide can seem like the ultimate abandonment for a child. Children need to understand that they didn’t cause the suicide. They also need to know that they couldn’t have prevented it.
When Spalding Gray, an accomplished writer and performance artist, died by suicide, his wife told her children the truth, according to the book Touched by Suicide:
I tell my children that suicide is an unhealthy state of mind versus a healthy state. That their father’s suicide was not done to them, that he killed himself to end his feelings of pain, not to cause pain to them.
In another case, the book Suicide: An Unnecessary Death describes a father of young children who struggled how to tell them that their mother had died by suicide. In a meeting with his therapist and his wife’s family, the family told the children that their mom had died of a “brain attack”:
That is, the depression clouded her thinking and she was unable to see any other way to solve her problem, likening suicide to a heart attack in which one’s heart fails to function properly.
Listening to Children After Suicide
Another important concern for children is to give them space to voice their reactions to the suicide – all of those reactions.
Many times, children blame the suicide on themselves. They may have said something mean to the person who died or even wished for the person to die. It is important to allow the child to talk freely about their feelings of self-blame.
The child may feel very angry with the adult who died by suicide. It’s important to make clear that such anger is not only acceptable, but also normal. Whatever feelings the child experiences, try to listen without judgment.
That’s the experts’ advice in a nutshell: Children need to be told about a loved one’s suicide, and they need to be heard, as well.
© 2013 Stacey Freedenthal, PhD, LCSW. All Rights Reserved. Written for Speaking of Suicide. Photos purchased from Fotolia.com.
I have been cutting myself and my friends want me to stop but i can’t now the boy who i like told me that his sister started to cut her self too she is my friend and she wants to stop how can she do that. p.s i don’t want to stop
Cutting or other self-caused pain releases feel-good endorphins in a person’s brain. (The pain triggers dopamine, etc)
With cutting, one becomes attached not only to the release of these endorphins, but also to the ritual itself.
If I were in such a place, I would try to slowly replace cutting with a healthy activity that gives you a similar release. A friend of mine successfully switched over to intense Shibari (Japanese rope art/bondage), as it gave her an even better release. In the meantime, make sure your friend isn’t cutting too deep, and have them watch for signs of infection.
*I am not a doctor, these are my own, personal beliefs.
Good luck, be well.
Today is the anniversary of my father’s suicide. It’s been forty-two years since I lost the love of my life at 8 years of age.
Early morning phone calls were not the norm. We all rushed into my mother’s bedroom, curious. She hadn’t had time to process the news herself, so when she attempted to tell us about my father’s broken heart, my 9-year-old sister asked if he’d had a heart attack. Mom just went with it.
Fast forward twelve years, a conversation with a co-worker sparked something that got me to confront my mother. I finally learned the truth. I was devastated. I have no idea how I managed to get to work that evening. I cried every day for a month, at least. The guy I’d met 4-5 months earlier noticed the difference in me but I wasn’t ready to talk about it. I wouldn’t have blamed him for giving up on me.
I have three defining moments in my life:
1971 – parents split and dad becomes a Sunday dad
1976 – dad dies of a heart attack
1988 – dad dies of a self-inflicted wound
That secret is ongoing. Very few people in my life are privy to this skeleton in my closet. I went to therapy for a short while and it seemed to help but it was a financial strain, so I suffer in silence. Well, not really in silence: my spouse of 30 years (that same guy I mentioned above) is going to be awarded a medal. How he’s still around, I’ll never know. I generally push people away, including my mother and sisters whom I haven’t spoken to in years.
I have no idea when and how my sisters learned and how their daily lives have been affected by it. We’ve never talked about it.
Shame, secrets, lies.
Wow, this is so similar to my experience! My Dad died by suicide when I was 6. He worked out of town and I was sleeping with my Mom one morning when there was a knock on the door. I remember seeing 4 of my aunts and uncles in the door window and my Mom saying “no” and starting to cry. After that, I remember bits and parts. One of my aunts told me he was dead and I wouldn’t see him again. Most of all, I remember feeling like they were hiding something and I thought it was probably because I did something wrong. I was told my Dad was sick and died in the mines. Fast forward to 14 years and having a conversation with my Mom about how other family members died and I asked her how my Dad died. She broke down and told me she had been waiting for me to ask. When she told me about his suicide, it was grieving all over again. It continues to be a struggle some days, although it has gotten better. She actually wanted to tell me when it happened but my paternal grandma didn’t want her to because she was afraid I would do the same as my Dad. I have spent my entire life feeling like I was lied to, even before I was told the truth. I just sensed it. To this day, I have never trusted one person entirely in my life. Kids sense the unsaid. Be honest with them on an age appropriate level!! I hope you are feeling better these days, but I understand.
ML, Thank you for your brutal honesty. And for your courage and strength.
I would like to use your comment, in its entirety, in a handbook for Survivors. ~Kimberlee