Children of suicide: the telling and the knowing

Abstract

Amidst the still limited literature on survivors of suicide, and the particularly scanty literature on children of parental suicide, little focal attention has been given to the special issues surrounding surviving parents telling the children that their deceased parent's death was a suicide. Those few papers that deal with this topic have primarily emphasized the destructive consequences of not telling of the suicidal nature of the death, with imperatives to tell the children the whole truth and do so promptly post-death. Based primarily on clinical and preventive work with children of suicide, this absolutism and one-size-fits-all approach is questioned, the difference between being told and knowing accented and illustrated, and the nature and effects of surviving parent explanatory frameworks for the suicide--the 'why' of it--explored.