How does someone experience a loss to suicide? A narrative exploration.

Suicide is a major public health issue and its research has shed light on how to prevent it nationally and internationally. Yet, how a suicide impacts its survivors, those who lost someone to suicide, has attracted scant attention. After Edwin S. Shneidman identified the needs of suicide survivors in 1960s, the traumatic loss to a survivor often results in being deeply wounded and the grief is prolonged, if not complicated. Being severed from the social network where the suicide survivors were situated prior to the loss, this detrimental experience brings shame, guilt, isolation and stigmatization. The trauma discourse has dominated the early research on suicide survivors, focusing on the pathological development and deterioration of their mental health. However, with the presentation of theories of resilience and post-traumatic growth, the authors argue that as survivors have gone through the acute crises of loss and have come to terms with the occurrence of suicide, they have embarked on the journey of rebuilding and restructuring their lives, recreating the meaning of the survivorship. Using Papadopoulos' Trauma Grid as a framework to investigate eight survivors in the UK, the authors presented contributing factors to the potentially unique developments of survivors.