Contact: Tom Ryan Humanities and Social Sciences Writer
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A family member's suicide affects "survivors" in ways that go beyond grief over the death of a loved one, causing emotional reactions that resemble post-traumatic stress disorder and should be treated as such, says an expert at the University of Illinois at Chicago who works with suicide survivors and researches ways to help them best cope with their emotions and loss.
Jay Callahan, assistant professor at UIC's Jane Addams College of Social Work, has spent more than a decade counseling relatives of people who have killed themselves and studying the effects of suicide on survivors. His research challenges assumptions about the emotional impact of suicide on family members and suggests "counseling models" should be modified to address "the trauma as well as the grief" and potentially be of greater benefit in aiding survivors.
Callahan recently surveyed 235 suicide survivors to try to gauge their reactions to "demographic, descriptive and situational" aspects of the death, such as their relationship to the person who died, the age of the victim, whether the survivor saw the victim's body and other aspects.
"Participants in survivor support groups frequently talk about the various elements that make up their emotional reactions," says Callahan. "While you shouldn't 'compare grief,' people tend to think that losing a child to suicide is 'worse' than losing another member of the family." He says it's not unusual for suicide to be seen as "worse" than other forms of death like homicide, car accident, cancer or AIDS.
Callahan's study found that the trauma of seeing the victim's body at the scene of the death was associated with the "most intense grief reactions" among survivors.
Somewhat unexpectedly, he says, the survivor's relationship to the victim was not associated with high levels of grief. But Callahan says additional research -- such as the closeness of the relationship -- is needed to better determine whether the relationship actually is a factor.
Supporting the view that suicide is a unique type of death, many counselors and therapists focus on helping survivors overcome their grief, "supporting their behavior for as long as it's needed, which can be years," Callahan says. "But if this goes on too long, it can be detrimental to the survivor."
Callahan says his research and counseling work have convinced him that suicide does not actually cause a unique reaction among survivors, but that it is similar in scope and severity to emotional responses to other types of traumatic death, "akin to post-traumatic stress disorder. The imnplications are that we need a counseling model that addresses the trauma as well as the grief."
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