Grief After Suicide: Walking the Journey with Survivors

While it shares some of the characteristics of all traumatic losses, suicide often presents unique challenges for mourners and for those who would help them. People mourning the loss of a loved one to suicide (known as suicide survivors), face a complex set of recovery tasks. These include making sense of a death that often makes no sense, sorting out responsibility for and preventability of the death, dealing with shock and horror at the manner of death, dealing with the impact on family relationships, and coping with the stigma that often surrounds suicide. Likewise, the process of counseling for suicide survivors is often more complex and prolonged than after most other types of losses. In this workshop, we will address the central concerns that most survivors bring to therapy, and the themes
that caregivers must help survivors address.