Vitamodo School · Bundle 2: Suicide Recognition & Prevention · Brochure 5 of 10 · Version 1.0
Andris Saulitis, MD
If you are yourself currently considering suicide, this brochure is not the right place to start. Please reach out to a crisis line or emergency service now.
Latvia: 116123
European Union: 112
United States: 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline)
United Kingdom: 116 123 (Samaritans)
For other countries: findahelpline.com
For those who: have lost someone they loved to suicide, and want to know what to expect of the grief that is now part of your life and how to carry it.
Not for those who: are themselves at risk — see the crisis lines above and reach out before reading further. Bereavement by suicide is itself a risk factor; if you are reading this and your own risk has begun to rise, the crisis line is the first call.
What this is — the clinical reality
This brochure is for the person who has lost someone they loved to suicide — a parent, a child, a partner, a sibling, a friend. The grief that follows this kind of loss is real grief, and it is also something more specific than grief. The clinical literature increasingly recognises bereavement by suicide as its own territory, with patterns, risks, and a phenomenology that ordinary grief support is not always equipped to address.
Three things you need to know.
The first is that bereavement by suicide is not just "harder grief." The specific features set it apart. There is the why that may never have an answer, and that the mind nonetheless cannot stop reaching for. There is guilt that has no anchor — the missed call, the harsh word, the busy week, examined relentlessly for the move that might have changed everything. There is shame that arrives unbidden from outside: from a culture that still treats suicide as something to whisper about, from religious frameworks that condemned it for centuries, from acquaintances who do not know what to say and so say nothing. There is the fact that the conversation about the dead person is harder to have than for any other death, because the cause itself has been so heavily stigmatised. These features do not make your grief defective. They make it bereavement by suicide, which has its own shape.
The second is that you are now at elevated risk yourself. People bereaved by suicide carry a higher risk of suicide than the general population — several times higher, in the years after the loss. This is not weakness. It is the cumulative weight of grief, the biology of severe stress, the cognitive constriction that loss produces, and, for some, the felt example of the person who is gone. Knowing this is protective. It is the reason the crisis line is on the front of this brochure and the reason the first task of this work is to keep yourself alive.