Join us on Wednesday, July 11, for the second annual
Midsummer Night's Soiree Benefit Concert at Vinegar Hill
Music Theatre in Arundel. Featuring the Don Campbell Band,
this beautiful evening of music, conversation, and community
will begin at 6pm with a reception.
Please click here to purchase your tickets today.
What children might feel after losing someone they love to suicide:
A children or adolescent may have a multitude of feelings or he may not feel anything at all. Whatever he's feeling remember your role, as an adult, is to help. Reassure your child whatever feelings he might experience, he has permission to let them out. If he wants to keep to himself for a while, let him. Don't tell a child how he should feel, or discourage him from expressing negative emotions like anger.
How do we explain suicide to children or young people?
Age is a factor in understanding and the types of information to provide. Some children are ok with a one or two sentence answer; others might have continuous questions they should be allowed to ask and to have answered.
When a child hears that someone "committed suicide" or died of suicide, one of their first questions might be, "What is suicide?" One way to explain is that people die in different ways - from cancer, heart attacks, car accidents, or old age for example. Suicide means that a person caused his or her own death intentionally. If he presses for more detail, use your discretion to help the child understand as much as is appropriate.
Some examples of explaining why suicide happens might be:
If someone the child knows, or the child herself, is being treated for depression, it's critical to stress that only some people die from depression, not everyone. Remind her there are many options for getting help, like medication, psychotherapy, or a combination of both.
A more detailed explanation might be:
It's important to note that there are people who were getting help for their depression and died anyway. Just as in other illnesses, a person can receive the best medical treatment and still not survive. This can also be the case with depression.
A child needs to understand that the deceased loved them, but that because of the illness he or she may have been unable to convey that or to think about how the child would feel after the death. The child needs to know that the suicide was not their fault, and that nothing they said or did, or didn't say or do, caused the death.
Some children might ask questions related to the morals of suicide - good/bad, right/wrong. It is best to steer clear of this, if possible. Suicide is none of these - it is something that happens when pain exceeds resources for coping with that pain.
Whatever approach is taken when explaining suicide to children, they need to know they can talk about it and ask questions whenever they feel the need. They need to understand they won't always feel the way they do now, that things will get better, and that they'll be loved and taken care of no matter what.
From Save.orgThank you to our Resource Page Sponsor: