| Coping With Bereavement |
Losing someone you love is never easy, whatever the age or circumstances of death. Until you have personally experienced a loss, it is easy to underestimate how bad the effects can be. When you have lost someone through suicide, anger and guilt can last longer and feel more intense. People bereaved by suicide are often called 'survivors'.
Whether you have lost someone yourself, or are supporting a grieving person:
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There is no 'normal' way to grieve
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Talk about it, even if it is painful
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Ask for support from relatives and friends
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It is natural to feel extremely emotional or aggressive (but violence is never acceptable), even if you are not normally a very emotional or aggressive person
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Let yourself take as much time as you need to grieve
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It can help to give support to others that are grieving too
Suicide and grieving
Grief has Five Stages. We all tend to go through them in the same order, but take different lengths of time to grieve. Here are the stages in the picture below, starting at the bottom with denial:
Sometimes people feel driven to search for a long time for why the person committed suicide. Survivors can feel responsible for the death and stay grieving for longer as a kind of self-punishment. When people get 'stuck' at any stage, professional help can be very useful (see directory).
Sometimes the grief hurts so much drinking or taking drugs can seem like the answer. Although this might make you hurt less or feel better for a while, the feelings of sadness, guilt and anger will re-appear in the long run. If you do decide to drink or use drugs to make yourself feel better, you may have to deal in the long term with an addiction problem as well as coming to terms with your loss.
Coping with shock
Some suicide survivors will have had the very traumatic experience of witnessing the suicide or finding the body. The memories of these experiences are very difficult to come to terms with, particularly if the death was violent.
