Across the Internet and elsewhere, people apply the term suicide survivor to two different groups of people: 1) people who struggled with suicidal thoughts or attempted suicide, and survived, and 2) people who were never suicidal at all, but who lost a loved one to suicide.
In a post last year, I defined a suicide survivor as someone who lost a friend, family member, or other loved one to suicide. I explained my use of the term this way:
The term “suicide survivor” – or “survivor of suicide” – is reserved for those left behind. It is used in the same sense that an obituary will say, “The deceased is survived by ….”
I was hardly alone. For decades, thousands of people – including researchers, suicide prevention advocates, lawmakers, and ordinary people – have used the term “suicide survivor” (or “survivor of suicide”) specifically for people who lost a loved one to suicide. The psychologist Edwin Shneidman, considered the father of modern suicidology, applied the term “survivor of a suicide” to people who lost a loved one to suicide as early as 1965.
Since then, numerous groups have referred to people who lost a loved one to suicide as “suicide survivors” or “survivors of suicide,” including the U.S. Congress, which 15 years ago established National Survivors of Suicide Day (the Saturday before Thanksgiving) to recognize people who lost a loved one to suicide.
In the last 40 or so years, numerous books targeting “suicide survivors” have helped people move through their grief, books like Survivors of Suicide, Suicide Survivors Handbook, Suicide Survivors: A Guide for Those Left Behind, Meditations for Survivors of Suicide, and No Time to Say Goodbye: Surviving the Suicide of a Loved One.
Suicide Language Evolves
Despite the term’s long history, I will no longer refer to people who have lost somebody to suicide as “suicide survivors” on this website, Speaking of Suicide. Instead, I will use the term “suicide loss survivors.”
Here’s why:
In recent years, a great number of people have come forward and publicly disclosed that they seriously considered suicide or made a suicide attempt. These individuals have brought into the light a problem long stigmatized and hidden.
Blogs such as livethroughthis.org contain photographs, interviews, personal accounts, and even videos of hundreds of people who thought about or attempted suicide, almost always with their full names attached. In just the last few months, articles highlighting this movement toward openness and advocacy have appeared in the New York Times, and the Boston Globe.
As more and more people with “lived experience” of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts have spoken out, the clashing definitions of “suicide survivor” have created ever more confusion. David Webb, PhD, is a suicidologist who survived a suicide attempt. He writes:
“When I first started looking at the suicide literature, I did a Google search on ‘suicide survivor’, hoping to connect with fellow survivors. Google replied with dozens, maybe hundreds, of hits but instead of fellow survivors, I found that this language had been claimed by those bereaved by suicide. I was rather taken aback by this… It seemed like we were invisible to Google and I felt that even the language we might use to identify ourselves had been stolen.”
Increasingly, people who made it through a suicidal crisis are claiming the term “suicide survivor” for themselves – people like Andrew O’Brien, the veteran who proclaims in an online video, referring to his outreach to soldiers, “I am a suicide survivor from PTSD… [one day] I told my suicide story to 500 uniformed soldiers, and I am not embarrassed by it.”
Major suicide prevention organizations are responding to the language controversy. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention changed the name of its International Survivors of Suicide Day to International Survivors of Suicide Loss Day.
Those who got out of a suicidal crisis alive really did survive a battle with suicide. Suicide tried to kill them, quite literally. And they lived to tell about it.
A Disclaimer for Suicide Loss Survivors
If you have lost a friend, son, daughter, spouse, sibling or other family member to suicide, you might identify as a “suicide survivor” even as others move away from the term. If you were to talk with me and call yourself a suicide survivor, I would never disagree or judge. What you call yourself is up to you, and the term “suicide survivor” may hold great meaning for you.
This post is not meant to imply rules or mandates for others to follow. Instead, I simply want to explain the terminology that I use on this website, and why.
Two groups of people with different needs and, in some ways, different agendas are going by the same name. It is confusing, and, to some people who have been through a suicidal crisis, it is hurtful, too.
Which Suicide Survivors Came First?
Suicide loss survivors were the first to adopt the term suicide survivors on a massive scale. Yet they were not the original suicide survivors.
I looked on Google Scholar for the first academic article ever to refer to suicide survivors. Among the many thousands of journals searchable by Google, the term suicide survivor first appeared in 1959, in an article that referred to “a post-slaying suicide survivor who had to be institutionalized for four years before he recovered sufficient mentality to stand trial.”
In 1975, a journal article reported the fates of seven people who survived after jumping off the Golden Gate or Oakland Bay bridge. Its title? “Suicide Survivors: A Follow-up Study of Persons Who Survived Jumping from the Golden Gate and San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridges.”
Still, even though there are a couple early references to suicide attempt survivors as “suicide survivors,” the term overwhelmingly has been used for people who lost a loved one to suicide.
Some people refer to suicide loss survivors by other terms. John R. Jordan, Ph.D., states, “In Europe and Australia, the more common language used to refer to this category of mourner is ‘the suicide bereaved’ or ‘the bereaved by suicide.’” I dislike these terms, because ideally bereavement is a time-limited period of mourning. Suicide loss is permanent.
Do Suicide Survivors Really Exist?
Regardless of who it is applied to, I have struggled with the term “suicide survivor.” Yes, someone who lost a loved one to suicide did not survive suicide. But really, nobody can survive suicide. Suicide is death. The only “death survivors” or “survivors of death” are those left behind. I presume this is why family and friends were called “suicide survivors” in the first place, just as people who lost a loved one to murder are called “survivors of homicide” and “homicide survivors.”
But “suicide survivor,” when applied to people who have seriously considered or attempted suicide, is a sort of shorthand. No, people do not survive suicide, but they do survive a suicidal crisis or a suicide attempt. “Suicidal crisis survivor” is clumsy. Really, who talks that way? “Suicide attempt survivor” comes more naturally, and its use grows as more websites, organizations, and news articles refer to attempt survivors.
The term “suicide attempt survivor” is imperfect, too. It excludes people who fiercely battled – or still battle – with suicidal thoughts and impulses without acting on them. Say that suicidal thoughts stalk a woman day in and day out. Finally, one night she lies in bed, tearful and clutching in her hands the means to kill herself, even rehearsing using it in various ways without actually harming herself. For hours, suicidal thoughts assault her. Despite her pain, despite her hopelessness, she exerts tremendous restraint just to stay alive.
Isn’t she a survivor, too? If so, a survivor of what?
A Caveat about Labeling, People, and Suicide
I expect that one criticism of this post will be why I feel the need to label people at all. Labels can be seen as dehumanizing – isn’t someone who survived a suicidal crisis or a suicide loss really just a person first?
I agree with person-first language. As a social work professor, I teach my students that there are no “borderlines,” only people with borderline personality disorder, no schizophrenics, only people with schizophrenia.
Labels can hurt, yet labels also can help. Whether we are talking about cancer survivors or suicide attempt survivors, trauma survivors or suicide loss survivors, the survivor labels can give people a way to connect with others like them, a sense of belonging, even a touch of pride and identity. They have survived.
Talking about Suicide is a Work in Progress
For now, at least, this site will use the labels “suicide attempt survivor” and “suicide loss survivor.” This certainly does not mean that Speaking of Suicide will exclude people who survived a suicidal crisis without making a suicide attempt, only that it will not refer to them by a shorthand label.
Ultimately, I would like to see the term “suicide survivor” apply to people who have survived a suicidal crisis – any suicidal crisis. The suicidal thoughts or suicide attempt could have killed them, yet they made it out alive.
At the same time, I worry that the term “suicide survivor” for survivors of suicidal crisis creates too much confusion, because of the term’s use, as well, by suicide loss survivors.
What do you think about language around suicide and survival?
© 2014 Stacey Freedenthal, PhD, LCSW, All Rights Reserved. Written for Speaking of Suicide.
Thank you so much for writing this piece as there certainly is a need for distinction. By way of one example, I have started a Suicide Loss Support group and when explaining about our Lived Experience (my co-facilitator and myself), it became not only confusing but I felt a tad dishonest in presenting us as equal in terms of our Lived Experience. Why so? Because I felt that participants would naturally think that both of us had shared a loss to suicide (which wasn’t the case).
To clear this up, I ended up by inserting the following paragraph in our literature:
The group is being co-facilitated by Brian and myself. I have a lived experience with a loss to suicide and Brian has a lived experience with a person attempting suicide. Together, we have a strong insight and appreciation of the nuances that a loss to suicide entails, including Complicated Grief and PTSD.
If I were to attend a Suicide Bereavement group, then I too think that I would just presume that both facilitators to have experienced a loss to suicide. I definitely would not possibly even consider that a person who attempted a suicide and survived – was one who was co-facilitating. Of course, I think we each (as any form of Lived Experience) have a contribution to make, or can make, to any given group but more so, if a Suicide Survivor of an attempt, in an environment such as a Suicide Awareness Training Workshop; not a group where hurting people are trying to navigate their grief and loss journey.
I can appreciate that a person who is sitting in a group as one who has lost a love one, that to hear another person speak about an attempt and to then be there talking about their survival, how this could make the person sitting there feel a host of emotions given their own loss. It is akin to hearing a person say:
“God sent His angels that night and they saved my love one”
…whilst the person who lost a love one is thinking:
“Well why didn’t God send His angels to save my love one?”
None of us want anyone to die, and yet I can relate to that unasked-for jealousy that can manifest when hearing one speak of their attempt and their subsequent survival whilst I am sitting there pondering and pining over the loss of my beautiful partner.
Such an excellent article and an aspect of the conversation around language which certainly needs to be explored and discussed further. Labels are sometimes there to divide (or can divide), or they can help with clarity. But in this particular instance, they are important for the nuances of distinction can ultimately offer a lot of strongly-needed support to those who need it most. But equally so, without these distinctions, they can inadvertently and sadly DIVIDE.
When my best friend took his life in 1992 I knew no term to describe everyone left behind. The unmitigated grief overwhelmed any thoughts or desire to utilize a word or a label to adhere to this unbearable burden. Eight years later when my mother took her life it seemed there was not enough oxygen to breathe and the world had crumbled away into an endless mire. Yet, Google had a larger part in once’s life now and a search yielded a new term to cope with being stained by our close association with the vast abyss. “Survivor of suicide” entered my mind and I applied that badge (as I had no other) and utilized it in conversations for many years. Yet words matter, and when they fit imperfectly many of us try to puzzle our way out of a problem (that perhaps is of my own making). “Suicide loss survivors” is the term I first saw on this website and I’m going to try to adopt this term. I want to adopt this new term because it overcomes a small niggling linguistic shortcoming that had bothered me from the very beginning: how do we clearly and compassionately identify and support those who actually attempted suicide and failed. Thank you for your support of those who’ve suffered loss because of the suicide of a loved one and for your support of those who have thought about suicide or even attempted suicide. That unmitigated support is life enhancing and the very expression of compassionate care.
I greatly appreciate this article.I have shared for years ,the confusion the term “suicide survivors” / survivors of suicide represents ,when applied to those who have lost a loved one ( or friend,etc) to suicide.The journey of complicated & traumatic suicide loss ,for those left behind ,is traumatic as it is,and it makes no sense,to 90%+ of the population,in ref.to suicide loss,to share ” I am a survivor of suicide ” or SOS,etc.Words do matter ,and labels can increase the stigma that already exists in ref to all things “mental health,” that I prefer to call ” emotional health” .I will not share,as a Proff nor as an individual( who struggles with TRD- Trauma,etc,) that I am a survivor of suicide nor will share,that I am “mentally ill,” or have a “mental illness”. I do not share,now nor ever have, after losing two family loved ones to suicide,that I am a survivor of suicide!! We do not refer,when we lose a loved one to cancer,that I am a ” cancer survivor “!! That is disrespectful,to those who have survived ,and or are ,still struggling With cancer.I have lost my brother ,and nephew to suicide, ages 43 & 46.,( and my sister to cancer ,age 49) Suicide loss ,has punctured a hole in my heart,raw and weeping,that is there forever. My sister passing from cancer,also put a hole in my heart,and that hole I cover with a band aid,in that I was present those last 36 hours ,by het side in he hospital.I am Not a survivor of any losses ,I am an indiv.who remains behind,with a fractured heart ,I will continue to repair,A journey of another kind.I tenderly , have compassion,empathy,and understanding for those who have made attempts to end their life,and have ” “Survived”..They are,for me ,the true “survivors” and also can be life’s great teachers,for they each have a story,their journey,their story. For those who share their story, I am so grateful.They define the word “Suicide Survivor” ,to me,and for most of the world.In this highly stigmatized world we live in,the words ” survivor of suicide “should simply be redefined. I wish my loved ones had survived.I am not a survivor of their passing.I am an individual ,with a shattered heart,but a heart that had been ,iniially focused on the ” why”?? In my 10 Years of searching on the” why”,I came to learn,and understand ,of A deeper depth of their raw ,emotional torture,that was relentless,A volcano of scorching lava, that cannot ,could not easily be stopped .I came to learn more of the Shame,Stigma,and Silence ,which led to my loved ones losses .They both did ask,for assistance often and again,but the response from their flawed family support systems ,was ” to man up,be strong,and to Never rely on medication of any kind,as that is a crutch,a tool that represents weakness,etc.”In brief,it is up to” You” to fix you!( medical examiners in both autopsies noted,there were 0 med.in both indiv.- and to offer clarity,which in truth it does not,but eliminates,medication related ques…I watched my brother and nephew,Fight,and Fight,relentlessly to Survive.They fought TO SURVIVE,again & again,and lacked,in many ways,A supportive emotional cheerleading section.Their wars were fought, often alone,and the responses they both received ,wad judgements and advice ,such as ” you need to see things this way,to try harder,to think positive,to be grateful ,etc.etc.Words most needed,were no words but ,for another to be present,fully present, & for one to offer support by ” listening & hearing and hearing and listening”. ,to be open,and non judgemental,to be human with another human in excruciating emotional pain,often invisible.Someone recently shared,these,thoughts with me, ” Christal,if you were on the 110 floor of the World Trade Center,as it was engulfed in flames,trapped ,what does one do ??in ref.to the often asked questions of why?( why does someone take their life)! I know I am veering a bit off topic,but am voicing an appeal,and will continue to share that the Medical Community etc.be open to discarding the term “survivors of suicide ,which is most often mis understood.!!Most of us,have had loss,of loved ones friends etc. in our lives.Loss may come after a struggle, (the often invisible struggles of emotional hell) and suicide loss ,represents an inner inferno…and that being said,how can I or anyone ,ever share, that they are a suicide survivor or a survivor of suicide??!!! Years ago,the words “mentally retarded ” were replaced with ” “developmentally disabled “..So change is possible and often needed for a clearer understanding and acceptance etc Only change can create change,.It is crucial ,I feel,and humanistic,and necesary, to reserve the words ” “suicide survivor ” / “survivor of suicide” for those who have survived a suicide attempt .They deserve and need our respect,understanding and support. Their stories,for those who may choose to share,are their stories and they Survived.They are, The Survivors of Suicide….and I remain so Very Grateful,for their courage in sharing their stories.The ” survivors of suicide” as I redefine those words,for me(& others) offer Hope ,Hope for me,and all those who emotionally struggle.Their ” survivor” stories toss life vests ,that help to keep ,me and others afloat. They share,they care .They are Survivors….They are my teachers ,and I remain their forever grateful student.Thank you Stacey.
Thank you Christal & Stacey.
On the 6th of March 2022, I found myself in a suicidal crisis. The thoughts I had about myself, my place in the world, my future and my family were washing over me like a storm surf battering a piece of floating debris.
But most of all the emotional pain I was experiencing was more than I could handle.
I then made a decision to end the pain permanently. This actually created a sense of calm and recognition of a way forward.
I put into action a long held plan or method of ending the pain.
I survived my attempt on my life. I then sought help and information from “Dr Google”. This was before talking to anyone about what happened.
This search was in the hours post failed attempt. The most logical term to Google and describe myself was,
“Suicide Survivor”
To my frustration I found lots of information for my family and acquaintances, should I have been successful. The suicide prevention pages had information for my family and acquaintances. Psychologist Web pages had my family covered and told me to seek help if I was suicidal.
I searched and searched wanting to know if how I felt was normal. I searched and searched for what to do next. I searched and searched for a support network to talk to.
I was invisible.
If I was suicidal there were resources everywhere I looked. If I had lost someone to suicide I was well looked after in the literature online. But as a survivor of an attempt I was ignored….. hidden…… non-existent.
By chance and chance only I finally googled differently and I hit a website called “Live Trough This.” I found resources that told me there were others like me. I found information to help me.
Until this point, I was lost, I even considered updating my suicide plan, with the new information from the previous failure, and trying again.
The point is that the most logical terminology that someone would google should be reserved for those who need it most.
What was I?
I was a suicide survivor. I had survived a suicidal crisis leading to a suicide attempt.
If I survive cancer I am a cancer survivor.
If I survive a car accident I am a car crash survivor.
If I survive a plane crash I am a plane crash survivor.
Most other survivors are refenced in the simplest terms available.
Suicide Survivor should be the same.
It could have been the difference between being here or not.
Dear Nick, I am sorry to learn about your frustration with your experience of obtaining a sense of understanding . I can see what you mean. There is literature and websites for the friends and acquaintances, but not the one who attempts suicide. I am new to this side of the issue and wonder if you have since come across any resources that have helped and supported you. My advanced apologies if I have in any way misunderstood your post.
I have struggled with this terminology for over 30 years. I felt like I was victimized by the person who took their own life as it impacted my life in a profound way and is something I will never forget. I felt like I was a suicide survivor, but it just didn’t sound right. I will consider using the phrases offered in this article as an alternative. Thank you for the information.
I am a survivor of my mothers suicide that happened in 2011.
No matter what you do to understand what would cause someone to take their life will always leave an empty feeling.
After my mothers suicide I never had a chance to grieve. I was raising my son at that time he was 8 and knowing that my son was also affected because he was very close to his nana.
My heart breaks for every person that loses a loved one to suicide.
I always wanted to be a voice to be able to help people going through alot of pain.
One thing I definitely learned that no matter what this is a very serious problem and there needs to be more available resources.