In the past week, we have learned that two students from Majory Douglas Highschool and a father of a Sandy Hook student have died by suicide. All three suffered some major trauma secondary to mass shootings at school, that they were either a witness of or a survivor of a premature child’s death.
I don’t know what all contributed to those more than tragic final deaths to occur, it could have been lack of access to mental health services, counseling or coaching, it could have been survivors guilt or it could have been simply not being able to live with the trauma endured or combination of all the above and then some.
None of these individuals chose to lose anyone close around them or living with the inevitable nightmares of what the trauma of being a survivor of a mass shooting entails. Most of us cannot even imagine going through an even like this, but I would argue, most of us can empathize that doing so would be hard to say the least.
What these mass shooting survivors / parents have in common is traumatic grief, i.e. sudden grief without any really logical explanation or making sense of it all, it is unlike losing a parent at old age, children and peers are simply not supposed to die. Sudden death in traumatic fashion affects all those who witnessed it and who are later on survivors.
Everyone deals with grief in a different way and there simply is no right or wrong way to grief, it just is. However, with traumatic grief also come complicated grief reactions, again, because the grieving individual can in most cases not make sense of the sudden death of a loved one, and that grief, in a lot cases is also combined with strong adverse/negative feelings towards the person who cause the grief in the first place.
In those cases, what is needed is trauma informed care/therapy or coaching, a place, where survivors can talk and be listened to too. I don’t know if this was lacking in those cases, but I surmise, it was.
In general, there are some signs of suicidal ideation, so as humans, not just care professionals, when faced with someone who is giving signals that might shine light on them not wanting to live their lives, at a minimum, LISTEN and DO NOT DOWNPLAY what they say, if you feel you can’t do that, there are helplines out there to assist and resources available to get help, in the most extreme case, call 911 to seek help. That is the least we can do.
If you know someone who has experienced incredible trauma, be there, lend a listening ear or just hold their hands, try to make sure they are not alone and what they are feeling as a reaction to trauma is normal.
And just as a reminder: Here is the number for the National Suicide Prevention Line
1-800-273-8255