Living with the Unimaginable: Surviving Murder-Suicide Loss
by Tawna Righter
The stories are plastered across the news: “Family Dies in Murder-Suicide” or they are simply mentioned in a few short sentences on Page 5 that another man has killed a woman and then himself. The scenarios differ slightly but the general outcome is the same: someone, usually a male, kills one or more persons and then himself. Families are horrifically devastated and communities are shocked and confused by the drastic actions taken by someone they knew to be a nice person. Unfortunately, it is a repeating scenario nearly everyday in America. 
Statistics collected from news clippings by the Community Awareness and Support Center, an organization founded specifically for murder-suicide survivors, show that 2008 experienced 533 murder-suicide events with the loss or wounding of more than 1,200 Americans. These tragedies leave countless numbers of survivors from the immediate families and friends, to work or classmates and first responders. I became one of these statistics in November of 1990 and then again in November 1998. Continue reading››
Men’s Experience with Grief
by Adrian Hill, LLB
In 1994, I attended my first suicide prevention conference with my wife, a noted psychologist with considerable expertise in suicide prevention and bereavement programs. Traveling to Canada’s artic, we visited Iqaluit in Nunavut, a community of 3,000 people, the only city in a vast region.
Organized by the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention, there were keynote addresses, workshops, seminars, and meetings with speakers from around the world. I volunteered to help out and immersed myself in the conference. I experienced firsthand the anguish and grief of the local community which has been ravaged by suicide deaths for the past 20 years. Knowing next to nothing about suicide, prevention, and bereavement, there was much to learn, absorb and take to heart.
This first conference experience for me started an educational process that quickly accelerated in 1996 when I became Executive Director of a National Lawyers’ Assistance Program in Canada. While I had helped found the program in 1990, I was now responsible for developing Health, Wellness, and Recovery materials for 70,000 lawyers and judges across Canada. To me, it had become natural to include suicide prevention in the new materials I was creating. Continue reading››
The Patient-Therapist Relationship in Suicide Loss
by Wayne Hankammer, MA, LPC
Loss is a large factor in suicide. Its impact on the suicidal person is well documented as well as the devastation of loss from the actual suicide. So, loss is a two-way street in suicidology. Suicide, felt as loss, ends life of one and changes forever the lives of others.
This is the story of my experience with death and how this reality changed my life. No stranger to death, I’ve seen it as a cop in accident scenes and elsewhere. While I was the commander for an Air Force Security Police unit one of our sergeants was murdered off-duty. I lost my father and dear friends, too. I also was a suicide hotline worker fielding one very lethal caller once. But nothing compares to the suicide death of a patient of mine who will be referred to here as “Dana.” At the time, I had been working as a therapist for about eight years professionally. The review of Dana’s suicide with staff was painful and necessary, but the impact to me was delayed. Continue reading››