Grief and Suicide
Remember the signs throughout the year.
Suicide Prevention Month is quickly coming to a close. This is a time to raise awareness of those who face the mental health dilemma of wanting to end their emotional pain. Grief and suicide are important topics often kept in the shadows. As a community we seek to shed light on this topic in September and throughout the year.
Let’s first recognize that suicide appears to provide an escape from incessant pain, from the voices within the soul crying for relief. In these turbulent times, mental health concerns continue to go largely unseen and untreated.
Anxiety, fear, uncertainty and chronic stress can heighten emotional instability. Grief lives everywhere from intimate relationships to fluctuations in the job market. Loss lives in the dark corners of emotions that rise and fall in unpredictable ways.
Grief and loss may feel like depression. It can manifest itself in feelings of isolation, as if no one cares about us. We are completely alone, even abandoned. Grief may not turn into suicidal thinking—yet once the thought is there, it can appear as a way to escape and end the pain.
Remember these signs throughout the year:
NOTICE when someone is more distant than usual.
LISTEN to their silence, words, sense of hopelessness.
SEE if routines have changed, eating and sleeping or giving belongings away.
ASK to see them, stay in touch.
DON'T BE AFRAID to seek professional assistance.
You cannot be the savior, but you can facilitate finding assistance. Be present for someone in pain. Use your voice. Trust what you hear, what you see and what you fear.
Edy Nathan, MA, LCSWR, CST, is a therapist and the author of It’s Grief: The Dance of Self-Discovery Through Trauma and Loss.
Edy’s private practice focuses on grief, trauma, and sex. Tough conversations people don’t like to have that cause obstacles in creating a life worth living. She is the first clinician to accurately label a term she coined, Sexual Grief, and speaks about those living with symptoms of which are often side-lined due to the ‘trauma’ conversation taking the spotlight. By bringing the ‘grief’ element into focus as it aligns with sexual traumatic events or experiences, this evolutionary project brings insight into the way loss affects the soul and the brain. She uses these insights to breathe new meaning into the lives of those stagnated and hijacked by their developmental losses or trauma. Edy is the author of “It’s Grief: The Dance of Self-Discovery through Trauma and Loss” and the soon-to-be-released, “Sexual Grief: From Loathing, to Liberation, to Love.”