Dealing with two important questions that follow suicide …

Few deaths leave those who remain with as many unanswered questions as suicide. When someone we know takes their own life, understanding how they could have reached that point can be extremely difficult. What made sense to them in those final circumstances may make no sense at all to the people who knew and cared about them. At the same time, those left behind often examine their own actions, wondering whether something they said or did — or something they noticed, missed, or failed to do — would have mattered.

For many people, that struggle eventually centers on two deeply personal questions: “Why did they do it?” and “Was there anything I could have done?”

Why did they do it?
Researchers have spent decades trying to understand what can bring a person to the point of suicide. Although no list can tell us exactly what was happening inside one particular person, research has identified experiences that commonly contribute to a person’s desire to end their life.

1. Unbearable psychological pain. Emotional suffering can become so intense that a person feels unable to continue enduring it. The source varies widely, but the important factor is how overwhelming the suffering has become for that person.

2. Hopelessness. A person may become convinced that their suffering or circumstances will not improve. Without an expectation that life can become better, continuing to endure present difficulties can begin to seem pointless.

3. Entrapment. The person feels trapped in circumstances or inner struggles from which they can see no workable escape. Options may exist, but the person no longer perceives those options as available or sufficient.

4. Defeat or humiliation. Severe failure, rejection, humiliation, loss, or a sense of powerlessness can leave a person feeling defeated. They may believe they cannot recover from what has happened or restore what they believe has been lost.

5. Shame, guilt, or self-hatred. Some people develop intensely condemning beliefs about themselves. They may see themselves as worthless, unforgivable, ruined, or unable to live with what they have done or become.

6. Perceived burdensomeness. A person may believe that their existence creates hardship for others and that those they love would be better off without them. This belief can be completely inaccurate while remaining deeply convincing to the person.

7. Loss of belonging. Profound loneliness, rejection, or alienation can leave someone feeling disconnected from other people and without a meaningful place in their lives. This can occur even when family and friends genuinely love and value them.

8. Loss of meaning or reasons for living. Relationships, faith, responsibilities, hopes, and purposes can provide reasons to continue through hardship. When those reasons no longer seem meaningful or sufficient, the person’s connection to life can become dangerously weakened.

Was there anything I could have done?
This question can carry guilt (“real” or false) as well as grief. Sometimes that guilt concerns something a survivor genuinely regrets. At other times, it grows from judging past actions with knowledge that became available only after the suicide. Research on suicide bereavement provides several important distinctions.

1. What seems obvious afterward may not have been knowable beforehand. Knowing that someone eventually died by suicide changes the meaning we give to earlier comments, behaviors, and events. Research has demonstrated this hindsight effect: people judge a suicide as more foreseeable when they already know it occurred. The relevant question is therefore what you could reasonably have recognized from the information you actually had before the death.

2. Being able to imagine a different action does not mean that action would have prevented the suicide. You may truthfully be able to say, “I could have called,” “I could have gone over,” or “I could have asked more questions.” What cannot usually be established is the next conclusion: “If I had, they would still be alive.” The first statement concerns an action you could have taken; the second assumes an outcome that can no longer be known.

3. Real regret and responsibility for the suicide are not the same thing. There may genuinely be something you wish you had done differently. Perhaps you dismissed a concern, responded poorly, or failed to act when you now believe you should have. You can take appropriate responsibility for your own action or failure without assuming that it made you responsible for the person’s decision to end their life.

4. Having influence with someone does not give you control over them. Family members and friends can have enormous influence, and taking suicidal danger seriously can save lives. But another person’s private thoughts, what they disclose or conceal, whether they accept help, and what they ultimately choose to do are never completely within someone else’s control. The fact that you might have influenced what happened does not mean you possessed the power to determine what happened.

There may never be a way to know with certainty what one different conversation, decision, or moment would have changed. Living with that uncertainty can be painful, particularly when we would give almost anything for a different outcome. But unanswered questions do not have to become accusations against ourselves.

Where there is something genuinely to regret, it can be faced honestly. Where guilt rests on hindsight, unknowable alternatives, or responsibility for things that were beyond our knowledge or control, it deserves to be examined just as honestly. Grief already asks a great deal of those left behind; it does not need to be made heavier by accepting blame that the facts do not support.

Scotty