Dealing with Suicide; A Professional’s Grief

Every 90 minutes, a life is lost in the UK to suicide (BBC, 2019).

As a mental health professional, my first experience of receiving the devastating news that a patient/service user (not the most humanistic of terms) had taken their own life brought the very nature of the job into perspective. A job perceived to be rewarding, for the reason that lives are saved every day, but also the most challenging when you find that you are unable to save everyone.

Naturally, you begin to question your professional ability and judge the limitations of your profession. “Did I do enough?” “Was there something else I could have done?” “Could I have done something differently?” There is a level of expectation that you are then required to process, deal and grieve within a minute of receiving the news, because in the next minute you are expected to deliver therapy to a service user who is having the same thoughts of taking their own life. It can have an overwhelming impact on professionals who are expected to remain resilient, as one mourns the loss of a person they have worked with both on a professional and a personal level.

Confiding in family and friends was not always helpful, despite their efforts in trying to console me. Sometimes you don’t want to hear that they’re sure you did the best you could, even if that is often the case. Following a service user suicide, learning the very details of it resonates in a way that feels as though only you know why they have done, what they did, where they did it and how they did it. It can be haunting.

Through reflective practice sessions, I began to process the fact that we had a level of responsibility to the person and somehow, for whatever reason, the intervention was not enough to save them. It is a traumatic event not just for the family and friends but for practitioners frequently exposed to it.

But, whilst reflective practice is helpful, that one conversation is often not enough.

The Reflective Room is a discussion forum that has been set up to keep the conversation going; aiming to provide a platform for anonymous peer support. It is a safe space where mental health professionals can share their own experiences of losing to suicide an individual they have worked closely with. As research has shown that mental health care is amongst the most stressful jobs in the UK (Chaplain, 2017), it is important to highlight that there is little research conducted on the challenges facing care professionals of working on the frontline. Especially where staff deal with loss through suicide. The very nature of the job involves working in a high pressure environment, and coping with the demands of a heavy case load has meant that professionals are already susceptible to severe emotional stress. Consequently, with an alarming increase of suicide rates, not every practitioner will have the opportunity to engage in a reflective practice session immediately after an incident such as this. - Especially for those who work in acute mental health services, where the priority lies with maintaining usual work load responsibilities (Awenat, 2017).

In a unique study conducted by the Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, results highlighted that only 17.7% of mental health professionals were offered formal support following service user suicide (Murphy, 2019). The reality is that there is little support available for mental health professionals. Both clinical supervision and reflective practice, in this instance, involves short intervention where professionals are encouraged to process trauma that have arisen in clinical practice, helping to reduce professionals’ distress (Mendes, 2015). However, studies have demonstrated that this is largely inaccessible to staff (Awenat, 2017).

For this reason, The Reflective Room provides the opportunity for professionals to acknowledge the loss of service users. There is evidence demonstrating that one of the most valued support for mental health professionals following a service user’s death has been informal peer support (Murphy, 2019). The Reflective Room encourages professionals to, therefore, reflect on the long lasting impact service user suicides has both personally and professionally. And in doing so, one may share something that others may identify with, providing professionals with the space to grieve.

To do this, the conversation must keep going.

Please be mindful not to use names or identifiable information of those who have lost their lives to suicide.



References


Awenat, Y. (2017). Staff experiences and perceptions of working with in-patients who are suicidal;qualitative analysis. The British Journal of Psychiatry , 103-108.

Chaplain, C. (2017). Most stressful jobs in the UK are in welfare, health and education, report reveals. Evening Standard .

Mendes, A. (2015). British Journal of Nursing. Coping with patient suicide and psychological debrief for nurses , 745–745.

Murphy, P. T. (2019). The Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine. The impact of service user’s suicide on mental health professionals.

Specials, B. R. (2019). Mental Health: The Importance of Talking. United Kingdom.


Sources of information

• Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide (SOBS)
SOBS’ aim is to provide a safe confidential environment in which bereaved people can share their experiences and feelings.
Contact:
0844 561 6855
www.uk-sobs.org.uk

• For anyone who is struggling to cope, who needs someone to listen without judgement or pressure, you can contact Samaritans on: 08457 90 90 90.
Email jo@samaritan.org.
You can also call into one of the 201 branches nationwide for face-to-face support. Log onto www.samaritans.orgto find your local branch and further information.