Survivors of suicide often feel completely alone in their sadness, which is quite understandable. Unlike losing a husband or child or parent to heart disease or cancer, loved ones of person who have committed suicide can’t express their grief publicly. As often as suicide happens — over 30,000 times a year in our country alone — the topic is still so taboo.
Awhile back I interviewed Eric Marcus, author of the sobering book, “Why Suicide?” He has now launched a blog with the same title, “Why Suicide?” where he will be posting essays and memories of persons who have taken their own lives. I’m certain it will become a healing forum for many.
Both of us have published a comprehensive list of celebrities and notable leaders or artists from the past who are suicide survivors. Dan Fields of the Grief Support Services program of Samaritans, Inc., has compiled the comprehensive list.
Thank you, Dan, for taking the time to compile this list, so that other suicide survivors feel less alone.
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I was not able to post on Eric Marcus’s blog – all comments were closed, that isn’t very helpful. So I will post my comments to him through your blog – hope you don’t mind.Hi, Eric, I have not read your book but I do have some comments about suicide – please forgive me if I say something wrong, or something that you already know because I have not read your book.I have been thinking quite a bit about suicide lately. Not because I am feeling suicidal, I have in the past, but because I have been suffering from a major depressive episode for that past 3 years. Along with this, my daughter’s close friend hung herself. gratefully she survived – her mom found her seconds after she performed the act.In your research I hope you have discovered that suicide is not easy and it is not always a choice. When someone dies by suicide after suffering a mental illness, you know, it is not necessarily to end their life but to find relief from the agonizing pain that they are in.Comments from survivors, or society in general that say the person took the easy way out, really angers me. It angers me because how can it possibly be easy? Alone, desperate, in agony, confusion and with a brain that is telling them that they aren’t worth living. I have walked with that brain, telling me that my family would be better off without me – several times. Fortunately I have had enough strength and insight to tell my brain “No, that isn’t true!” Not everyone can find that strength. They are obviously not in their right mind when they take their own life. If they were they wouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If suicide was easy we would be stepping over bodies on the street.I have also been fortunate to keep sight of who I have to live for – my daughters. Not everyone can do this, not everyone can tell their brain that it’s a lie – I am not a burden to my family. It takes tremendous strength to be able to do this.Depression, in my experience, is like living with a monster that is hell bent on taking your life, on winning the fight. Sometimes I can feel it lurking in the back, waiting for a vulnerable moment to rise and gain strength from my overwhelming life moments.When I had my first episode I was confused, alone and didn’t understand what was happening to me. How could I feel so much pain? how could it change me? I wanted to say to the world “This isn’t me.” It was terrifying to be alone with myself because I didn’t know if I had the strength to survive. After 19 years of going through this I still wonder if the next episode is going to take my life. I have to pray that I don’t lose sight of the ones who would be devestated by my loss.When I read that you had written a book about suicide survivors I naturally thought about the people who attempted and lived or the people who have battled depression, fought with all of the strength that they could find to survive. Those are truly survivors and should be given credit for doing so. I say this not to undermind the pain of the people who are left behind.Just as you have questions about “how could they?” We, the suffers of mental illness struggle to understand our suffering as well. And as difficult as it is to understand it from the outside, it is even more difficult to understand, or make logical sense of it from living on the inside of it.Thanks for the opportunity to voice from a “survivor’s” point of view.