My mother’s suicide and Kate Spade’s
Every time that I hear that a mother has died by suicide and left a child or children behind, my heart goes out to the family. It is particularly painful when the death is of a celebrity like Kate Spade and gains the media spotlight.
This is personal and professional for me. I am a child psychiatrist, mother of three grown children, as well as a daughter who lost my mother to suicide at 4 years of age. I was the youngest of six children and my parents were in the midst of a publicly contested divorce, so when my mother wrote a suicide note it was plastered on the front page of the local newspaper: “Society wife a suicide: Left two notes, feared loss of children, ends tangled life.”
When my sister and I were teenagers, we searched microfilm in the Boston Public Library for newspaper articles like this one about our mother. I resurrected her again as an adult, determinedly seeking answers over a 10 year period, including interviewing family and friends, culminating in a memoir.
It is agonizing seeing a family’s personal pain dealt with in the media, and I don’t want to be exploitative, yet I also see this as a teachable moment for all families who may have lost someone to suicide. These families wrestle with the exhausting, impenetrable, and excruciating question of why.
The majority of suicides are a result of mental illness such as depression. I have devoted my professional life as a child psychiatrist to prevent this devastating outcome. Fortunately, many people who are depressed do not go on to kill themselves. Thomas Joiner, a top suicide researcher, outlines three risk factors that increase the likelihood someone will die by suicide: perceiving themselves as a burden to their loved ones, feeling isolated, and an “acquired ability for suicide.”
When someone is depressed, they may have the mistaken assumption that they are disposable. This is a cognitive distortion; it is faulty logic. They may see themselves as a perceived burden to their family, and feel that they are doing them a favor by ending their life. When someone is depressed and begins to see herself as expendable in the lives of her family members, when she starts talking about young children as being self-sufficient, these are very troubling signs.
Cognitive behavioral therapy, which helps to challenge this faulty logic, can alleviate the suffering. Helping your loved ones to understand how much they are appreciated and valued can help decrease the self-deprecating beliefs.
It can help to understand that many suicides, even in people with underlying substance abuse or depression, occur during a short-term crisis. This speaks to how important it is to ensure those we love who are struggling develop a safety plan along with their caretakers. A safety plan can include identifying what triggers crisis, use skills to tolerate distress, remove access to lethal means and if no relief access emergency care.
My mother wrote a novel that I discovered 40 years after her death ominously called “The End of Freedom.” I came to look at it as an extended suicide note in which she minimized the impact of her death on others. Those of us left behind try to decipher the meaning and are left bereft. Often the way to heal is to both grieve and then celebrate the way that the person lived.
When someone dies by suicide, it is as if they took their skeleton and put it in your closet. Suicide demands an explanation, but the answer dies with the victim. The survivors may be grief-stricken, left with ambivalent feelings such as anger, shame or guilt. Children are particularly vulnerable to feeling responsible, even though it seems obvious that they could not possibly have caused their loved one’s demise. I always encourage adults to communicate to the child that nothing they said or did caused the suicide.
When parents struggle with the burden of depression, as my mother did, they also feel responsible for protecting their children, and so hide their struggles from them.
However, parents can help their children adapt by not keeping secrets, but rather sharing, in an age-appropriate way, what is happening to the family. This, along with reassurance, helps children cope more effectively with the challenges.
In the tragic event that a parent does die by suicide, it is key to address the secrecy, shame and sense of abandonment that survivors may feel by providing honest information that is age-appropriate. I would tell all families who are “touched by suicide” what I have come to appreciate now, 54 years after my mother’s death: Love lasts longer than death.