Suicide survivors need long-term support

I write this as a concerned northerner who has lost numerous friends, colleagues, neighbours and loved ones to suicide and seen the devastation and impact on others.

This year, with World Suicide Prevention Day on Sept.10, I want to focus on those who have lost a loved one. Often, as time passes, the depth and intensity of their loss fades from community memory as people go on about their own business. To the survivor, however, this painful reality cannot be as easily forgotten.

Memories are held close and very dear for they are all that is left. They are precious. Pain is experienced quietly and deeply too, as everyone else rushes on by. Often, the number one person on their mind is not spoken of out loud but is the most recurring topic internally. Survivors, along with their suffering, are underestimated and greatly misunderstood.

We know a lot more now than we used to about the hardest and longest grief of all — the bereavement that follows a completed suicide. We now know too, the long-term effects for some if proper intervention, support and follow-up is not provided.

Some will talk to the bottom of a bottle, which becomes their pain medication. At the start, it is unclear to them how this outlet will create even more problems. Some will store up anger from the unresolved grief and lash out at others. Some, whose boundaries have been blurred as their world has been turned upside down, may develop a world view based on the trauma and become overly protective, overly reactive or overly vigilant — afraid for themselves and their loved ones and distrustful of life itself.

All of these conditions may result from trauma of which they usually know very little. As the years go on, life has been altered to the point where they return to normal. Too many people in Nunavut face these challenges every day but do not necessarily link their behaviour, attitude and emotional state to such a loss.

When life has become unbearable the survivors end up feeling alone and invisible. No one in the North deserves to suffer in silence like this in an age where the long-term effects of untreated trauma are known and well understood, when trauma counselling, bereavement support groups and long-term therapy is available elsewhere.

The more we can possibly do to let them know we have a kernel of insight into what they are dealing with, the more helpful we will be. We have an urgent responsibility and an ethical duty to pay great attention to them and provide them with the tools and information to make it through their long journey of grief.

If many of them feel they are “stalled” in this process it is because they ran out of gas in the form of isolation and the forgetfullness of others; they need recognition and on-going support to make it the rest of the way in an arduous process that will demand a lot from them still.

To anyone reading this who is a survivor, do not stay alone with this immense burden. Take the time to take a look at your life and commit to reaching out. We have all lost so many and the tears have flowed for so long; do not be afraid to explain to others what you are still going through.

Community memory can be harnessed too, to identify those who, over the years, have suffered this type of loss; efforts can be made to approach them, remember their grief anniversaries and those they have lost and to regularly check in with them to show your honest awareness and concern and see how they are doing.

We have always demonstrated, in the North, our capacity for being of genuine assistance immediately after a suicide occurs. The house fills up with people, food and a thousand acts of kindness. We shine in these moments, the good caring people that we are.

If we could only work harder to extend that same concern and sense of connectedness over a much longer period of time, it would also go a long way to providing the very valued and necessary post-vention, monitoring and follow-up support that is so desperately needed.

Caroline Anawak
Ottawa