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Hi Everyone, my name is Emily and I am a 17 year old high school student.  I am conducting a research paper on the impact of suicide on the family and the feelings that come with losing a loved one by suicide.  The paper must include primary research, therefore I am trying to collect information online from people who have experienced these situations.  I know this is a very touchy subject for many so i do not want to over step my boundaries, but if anyone is willing to answer some questions for me that would be very helpful. 

1. How old was the loved one you lost?

2. What was your personal connection to them?

3. What emotions did you feel after the suicide?

4. How long did it take to accept the loss?

5. What steps did you take to overcome the loss?

6. Was the person who committed suicide suffering from an illness?

7. How did the suicide effect the community?

If you have anything else you would like to say on the topic please do so. 

Thank you for your time, my condolences to anyone who has lost a loved one by suicide!

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Emily,

It is interesting that I happened to come across this post tonight. I have lost three very close friends to suicide, and my friends have actually begun a Suicide Prevention Coalition here at Mizzou, and we have begun to research groups that can assist us and ways that we can make this epidemic come to an end. This being said, I think that I can answer any questions about suicide and grief that you could ever want to know. It is time for us to stop dancing around the subject and confront it head on. I will help in any way possible.

1. The first friend that I lost was during my freshman year of college. She was 19. It was 2012. The next friend that I lost was in April, and he was 20. The third friend that I lost was in June of this year, two weeks shy of his 21st birthday.

2. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of these losses is that the first and last of my friends that took their lives were actually each others very best friend. I met my last friend, Ryan, through Carolyn, my friend who passed away in 2012. She was his very best friend. Through her death, I became close with Ryan, and we created a very strong friendship. I met my friend Craig, who passed away in April, when I was a freshman in high school. We dated briefly and then became good friends. We unfortunately fell out of touch in college a little bit more.

3. The emotions that I felt after these suicides is inexplicable. With Carolyn, it was the first suicide that I experienced. I felt shock at first. I didn't believe that it was true. I found myself calling her phone and texting it every hour, just so that she would respond. I was shocked that she felt this way and didn't tell anyone, and especially due to the fact that she was constantly the life of the party. I never saw her in a bad mood. She was constantly smiling, making everyone lighter and happier. After the shock set in, it was sadness. I spent my summer after my freshman year crying in my room,regretting every conversation that I didn't have with her, how I 'could have' stopped it but failed, how I was so sad that I never told her how I loved her, appreciated her, wished that she was here. The last emotion that I had was anger. I felt that if I was angry, it would take away from the sadness that I felt. It was so much easier for me to be angry at her, to be so mad that she left behind all of the people that she loved because she felt pain in a specific moment, when she should have looked ahead and around to all of the beautiful things that surrounded her instead of her selfishness. Much of that anger that I feel still resides. I have now moved on to acceptance. With the years that have passed, I have learned that it is impossible to measure someone else's threshold level of pain, and what they can and cannot handle. The same applied to Craig. Ryan's suicide was a much different feeling, however. Ryan, as Carolyn's best friend, understood the pain that everyone went through. He stood by my side as we listened to Carolyn's mother dedicate a bench in her honor two weeks before Ryan committed suicide, and we held onto stones that she passed out that described us as suicide survivors, and encouraged anyone who was feeling even 'a little blue' to contact her so that we would never have to feel the pain again. We thought that we would never have to experience it again in our lives, and then came Ryan. The overwhelming sadness that accompanied, and still accompanies Ryan's death is something that I don't think that I am ready to put into words yet. He was one of the most well-liked, genuine, popular kids that has ever walked through Mizzou, and we are reeling from his death and have not begun to process it yet. The emotions are still so very fresh.

4. With Carolyn, it took me two years to accept her loss. I found myself coping with her death through alcohol and various other means. I did not handle it well. I accepted Craig's in the way that I have accepted Ryan's, and that is by pushing it to the side and pretending that it did not happen. While I know that it did, and those moments seep in through time to time when I am feeling down, or it is late and I am sad, I try not to think about it, because it would be overwhelming for me to have to process. I am still accepting the loss every day as I think that I see Ryan's tall self in a crowd, or look for Craig's name to pop up in my phone on a text message

5. I did not take steps when it came to Carolyn's death. I thought that I was strong and could deal with it myself, and I learned that was not the case. With Craig and Ryan, I began to see a counselor. I have had 12 friends of mine pass away within the last three years, and this was too much for me to take. I began to see a christian counselor, who helped me to express my feelings in a healthy way and taught me the proper ways to grieve. That has helped me a bit.

6. If depression is to be diagnosed as an illness, I would say that Carolyn and Ryan were both depressed. Carolyn had extreme mood bouts that caused her to react suddenly and impulsively. She had threatened suicide many times throughout her life. She also was on drugs at the time of her death, MDMA to be specific, which made many of us think that she would not have done it had she not been on the drugs at the time. While Craig was not depressed, he was on drugs at the time as well. Ryan is a difficult case to tackle. Ryan was not depressed, per se, but had hit his head while playing a sport previously and had extreme dizziness constantly that made his quality of life very poor. He was very sick due to constantly vertigo and he developed extreme anxiety due to it.

7. There are no words to how the community has been affected. As we go to a college that has 36,000 people, they met so many friends that connected with them on many levels. They also went to very big high schools with us in St. Louis, and played sports, making them even more friends than most normal people. The community has grappled iwht the ways to deal with it, but have come up with a recent solution, and that is the Suicide Prevention coalition that we have createdh here at school. We are making a documentary about the ways that we can educate youth on suicide prevention and how to see the warning signs and help those who are needed. We are choosing to learn from these tragedies in a positive way, so that it doesn't happen to another one of our friends. We have seen our sorority sisters, fraternity brothers, teammates, family members and girlfriends/boyfriends struggling from these suicides.

8. I would like to say that the real survivors of suicide are those that are left behind. The pain does not go away due tot he fact that they took their own lives- it is simply passed onto those that are left to deal with it. While I would not say that it is selfish for them to do so, at times it feels that way. It feels very unfair to have to deal with the regrets that we have to live with because of the things that we never said or did. That being said, I also think that we need to make people aware of the help that they can get while they are feeling at their lowest. We need to make this more well known. It is such a touchy subject that people are fearful of, but they can't be. If we don't start talking about this, it will only get worse. I want to remind people that they aren't alone, that there is a light, and that their story matters.

I hope this helps .

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