Will I kill myself like my parents?

DEAR BEL, THE question I want to ask is this: does suicide run in the family?

My father committed suicide because he had an incurable disease.

His sister committed suicide because she was depressed. My mother committed suicide because she was depressed, too.

My brother tried to commit suicide by cutting his wrists, but luckily his wife found him in time and he spent time in a psychiatric unit.

I have suicidal thoughts, but don’t have the courage yet to do it.

I am in my late 60s and don’t see any point in carrying on living. RITA

This extremely short, bleak email tells a terrible story — and i feel great compassion for you, carrying its weight. i realised how little i really know — even though we have printed letters about suicide in the past. Does the tendency run in families? it seems the answer is yes.

An important study made by Danish researchers found that a person is more likely to commit suicide if a family member has taken his or her own life or has a history of psychiatric illness. i can’t say this surprises me. But is it genetic — or, for want of better terminology, a matter of suggestion / mimicry?

scientists say that people with a family history of suicide are two-anda-half times more likely to take their own life than those without such a history. What’s more, a family history of psychiatric illness ( requiring hospital admission, like your brother) increased suicide risk by about 50 per cent for those who did not have a history of psychiatric problems themselves.

Experts have found that clustering of suicides within families occurs and that suicidal behaviour in part might be genetically transmitted. i’m trying to answer your direct question with reference to what others have discovered (and are still researching), but must add one significant note of reassurance and hope.

Even if you have a family history of suicide and of psychiatric problems, your life is not pre-determined.

Family history is an important risk factor, but still accounts for only a minority of all suicides. One study found family suicide history accounted for 2.25 per cent and family psychiatric history for 6.8 per cent of more than 4,000 suicides. Please note that.

The feeling of depression/despair that prompted this email leaps from the page, and so i sincerely hope you can find help. if you feel at risk, please call the samaritans (from any phone, 116 123) or look up a local branch using the website samaritans.org.

i’m sure it would do you good to talk through this issue, your fears and your unhappiness with a trained counsellor who can help to unpick some of your negative feelings ( see bacp. co. uk/ about- therapy/ how-to-get-therapy). You tell me nothing about friends or other relatives, but i beg you to turn to others for support. My latest inspirational discovery is a book called The Choice by Edith Eger. This marvellous woman (another concentration camp survivor; last week i mentioned her mentor Viktor Frankl) could, i believe, give anyone a reason to live.

here is one thought: ‘sometimes the worst moments in our lives — the moments that set us spinning with ugly desires, that threaten to unglue us with the sheer impossibility of the pain we must endure — are in fact the moments that bring us to understand our worth.’

she goes on to say that each of us has a choice whether to re-enact the painful past or move forward ‘and let a new crop flourish from the field of our life’. All i can do is to urge you to think about that, to look in the mirror and tell yourself that you are worth the gift of your existence. And to talk to others.

The pain and loss within your family must be an ongoing trauma. Yet Edith Eger — whose parents perished in the holocaust and who was pulled from a pile of corpses, age 16 — is living proof of how the miraculous will to survive can empower the human spirit.