The Establishment ran a valuable piece on the trauma suicide survivors experience, and we thought it was with sharing here. If you’re a suicide survivor, or if you know someone who is, and if you recognize the symptoms described in the excerpt below or the full article you can click through to, we hope you’ll reach out for help. And if you’re in the greater Cleveland area, you can reach us here.
This story is part of The Establishment’s series on PTSD Awareness.
I have replayed the scene in my brain thousands of times.
It takes place in the house we lived in at the time, which was situated on a corner of a busy street where many people awaited their buses. The small TV in the living room was showing The Great Mouse Detective, one of my favorite childhood movies. I was watching it from the sofa—I haven’t viewed the movie since.
This is where I was the moment I was told my brother had shot himself. I let out such a terrible shriek that the strangers outside the window stopped talking. For a brief moment there was a pure, unadulterated silence.
I remember a bolt rising from the top of my head, expanding to the hot furnace that was my skin. I rushed to my room where I slammed my fists into the walls, tore blankets from the mattress, and began swinging my arms, hitting anything and anyone in my path. I screamed so hard that I was left without air. I was given a valium to numb my body into sleep—it was a sleep fraught with terrifying images of my brother leaving. I heard bullets bursting in the air; my sheets were sweat-filled the next morning. There was a sense of drowning, of falling, of being completely shattered.
Something had fractured in my mind.
The world had become divided—between the before and the after of my brother killing himself. It was if a large vortex had opened up, and all the images of his face and our lifetime of memories had been violently pulled from me into its dark void. Only people who’ve experienced this kind of severe trauma can fully comprehend what it means to be totally obliterated by a single moment.
The emotional whiplash of my brother’s death reverberated into a manifold of symptoms; they remain, even 12 years later.
And they are symptoms I am far from alone in experiencing. In the United States, nearly 40,000 people a year die by suicide. Each of these leaves behind an estimated six or more survivors, many of whom experience Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).