Vitamodo School · Bundle 2: Suicide Recognition & Prevention · Brochure 6 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: must tell a child or several children, today or this week, that someone in the family has died by suicide — or who have already told them in a way that needs returning to.
Not for those who: are themselves at risk — see the crisis lines above and reach out before reading further. The conversation with the child cannot be carried by an adult in immediate crisis.
What this is — the clinical reality
This brochure is for the adult — a surviving parent, an aunt or uncle, a grandparent, a guardian — who must tell a child or several children about a suicide death in the family. It applies when the deceased is a parent of the child, a sibling, a grandparent, a close family member. The principles also apply when the death has already been told inadequately and needs to be returned to in a different way.
Telling a child about a suicide death is one of the hardest acts of parenting most adults will ever perform. It is also one of the most consequential. Decades of clinical work and several decades of research now converge on a single set of principles. The principles can be summarised, learned, and applied. They do not make the conversation easy. They make it survivable for the child and for the adult who has to do it.
Three things you need to know.
The first is that children almost always sense that something is wrong. The phone calls in the night, the changed faces of adults, the disrupted routine, the unexplained absences, the muted conversations — the child reads all of this, often within hours. The silence the adults often choose to maintain in the name of protection is not, from the child's perspective, silence. It is a presence that has no name. Children, particularly younger children, fill that unnamed presence with their own narratives. The narratives the child constructs alone are almost always worse than the truth.
The second is that age-appropriate truthfulness is a clinical skill, not a moral choice. The principles can be taught. The right words are not the same for a four-year-old, a nine-year-old, a fourteen-year-old. The shared core: the death is named honestly, the cause is named in language the child can carry, the child is told explicitly they did not cause it, and the door is left open for future questions. What changes with age is the level of detail, the abstraction, the framing.