Blogs

In "How To Help Friends in Mourning," Megan O'Rourke reviews the results of an earlier Slate survey on grief, pinpointing what bereaved people themselves said about their needs.

The most surprising aspect of the results is how basic the expressed needs were, and yet how profoundly unmet many of these needs went. Asked what would have helped them with their grief, the survey-takers talked again and again about acknowledgement of their grief. They wanted recognition of their loss and its uniqueness; they wanted help with practical matters; they wanted active emotional support. What they didn't want was to be offered false comfort in the form of empty platitudes.

The survey results emphasized the following:

In a Boston Globe interview, sociologist Nancy Berns of Drake University shared some of the ideas from her new book Closure: The Rush to End Grief and What It Costs Us. She says,

The closure narrative assumes that grief is bad and that it’s something that needs to end, and it assumes that closure is possible and that it’s something good and something that people need to have. Grief is a difficult, messy experience and can be very painful ... Our grief expresses how we’re feeling and allows us to acknowledge [a] loss. So asking or expecting someone to try and end that quickly is really misunderstanding the importance of those emotions.

The February 2010 issue of EMS Magazine offers a wealth of practical information about being helpful immediately after a suicide that is applicable not only to first responders but also to any caregiver in the aftermath of a suicide fatality.
In "Help Those Left Behind," EMS Magazine's editorial director, Nancy Perry, sets the stage for the magazine's feature treatment of survivor grief with these insightful words:

There's no question that those left behind in the wake of a suicide are as much the victims of the event as the person who has chosen to end his or her life.

New research is going beyond the current understanding of Complicated Grief (CG) to explore additional factors that might play a role in assessment and treatment of the malady, which may affect 10 to 20 percent of bereaved people. For instance, according to findings recently published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychiatry, there is

... important preliminary evidence that persons suffering from Complicated Grief are less able to flexibly enhance and suppress their expressions of emotion compared to asymptomatic bereaved and nonbereaved adults.

At a brainstorming session among national leaders of the suicide survivor community and other experts, which SAVE organized this spring in Portland, one need identified as being of utmost importance was, as Kim Ruocco of TAPS put it,

We need to know more about what about a support group makes it healing.

Ruocco's declaration was echoed repeatedly by others during the Portland meeting, and a recently completed review of 20 years of literature on peer-support services in the mental health field emphatically confirms the need for more and better research on support groups: