(Sept. 8, 2016) More than 43,000 Americans die of suicide annually, each one of them prematurely lost to mental health conditions that could be treated. Reducing these numbers is the focus of National Suicide Prevention Week, which ends Sunday.
Secondary victims of these deaths are the survivors – the parents, children, spouses, siblings, colleagues, neighbors and friends – for whom the universal experience of grief is compounded by the exceptional guilt and second-guessing than typically comes with suicide.
Dana Mich is one of those survivors. Mich lost her father to suicide in November 2015. In an op-ed published by the Washington Post in connection with National Suicide Prevention Week, Mich shares how she has coped with grief by learning how to “just be.”
The Treatment Advocacy Center’s chief of research and public affairs, Doris A. Fuller, is another survivor. Fuller’s Washington Post story about her daughter Natalie’s March 2015 death from terminal mental illness was republished worldwide.
Fuller talks about what she has learned in the 18 months since then as a guest Mich’s blog, MovingForewords. "How then, shall I go on from this terrible crossroads, where the past with Natalie meets a future without her?” Fuller writes.
Her answer is published in “Live” at MovingForewords.com.