Denial in suicide survivors

It is not uncommon to detect the psychodynamics of denial operating in survivors, for example, those who lose a significant other to suicide, especially if the significant other is a child. This denial is apparent in two major areas. First, the survivors often deny that the suicide gave any cues to their impending suicidal actions. Interestingly, early in the study of suicide, researchers wondered why suicidal people did not communicate more often their suicidal intent to their relatives and friends. Robins et al. (1959) studied a sample of 134 suicides and found that 69% did make prior communications about their suicidal intent, with a mean of 3.2 communications per suicide among those who had communicated suicidal intent. Researchers then began to ask why their relatives and friends ignored this communication. There is the common myth in our culture that those who talk about suicide will not do it (Lester & Lester, 1971). Thus, some survivors say that they did not take even overt threats of suicide seriously. Survivors also fail to notice cues that signal the presence of a crisis in the significant other. For example, before Craig Badialis, a 17-year-old high school student, killed himself he took all the posters and decorations off the walls of his room and cleaned out the room (Asinof, 1971). He also gave all of the money (notes and coins) that he had to his sister-in-law (who was living in the same house). No one in the house remarked on this behavior. Of course, because I am a suicidologist, I would be expected to recognize these actions as cues to impending suicide. But I think I would have recognized a crisis in this teenager even were I not a suicidologist! The brother of an acquaintance of mine killed himself in his teenage years. Before his suicide, he had not spoken to anyone in the house for seven days—neither his parents nor his brother. Frankly, five minutes of silence from a significant other elicits a strong reaction from me, let alone seven days of silence! The problem for the relatives of suicides is made difficult if the potential continually threatens suicide. If one is married to an alcoholic or a chronically depressed person who threatens suicide weekly or even daily, one is likely to ignore such threats eventually. Indeed, the person may be so difficult to live with and so destructive to your own life that you actually begin to wish for his or her death, and Richman (1986) and Meerloo (1962) have documented the hostility and even murderous impulses of some family members of suicidal people. The second major area of denial in survivors is denial of responsibility for causing the suicide. Physiological (and especially genetic) theories of psychiatric disorder and suicide are popular because they absolve the parent of responsibility for the psychiatric and suicidal problems of their offspring. Psychodynamic theories offer an alternative position, namely that the actions of the parents (and other significant people in the child’s life) determine to a large extent the later thought, desires and behavior of the child. Indeed, Transactional Analysis proposes that injunctions from the parents to their child in the first year of life, such as “You should not exist” (consciously or unconsciously communicated to the infant or child), increase the risk of later suicide in that child. The role of parents in the suicide of their children can be illustrated by the published account by Danielle Steel (1998) of the suicide of her son, Nick. Nick may well have killed himself whatever Steel might have done for him during his 19 years. However, there is an absence in her account of Nick’s life and death of consideration of the role that she may have played in his life course. In Steel’s opinion, Nick had defective genes which caused a manic-depressive illness and attention-deficit disorder. Since her side of the family was psychiatrically healthy, it must have been the genes passed on to Nick by