Apparent suicides of Parkland teens, Sandy Hook victim’s father spark conversation about suicide prevention, survivor’s guilt

The apparent suicides over the past week of two teens who survived last year’s Parkland, Fla., high school shooting and the father of a child who was killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Conn., have communities grieving all over again.

They also have experts emphasizing the importance of ongoing counseling and resources for survivors of traumatic events.

Sydney Aiello, 19, took her life last week, according to The Associated Press. Aiello’s mother said her daughter, who had survived the Feb. 14, 2018, shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, in which 17 others were killed, had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after the event and was struggling to attend college.

Over the weekend, a 16-year-old boy, who also survived that shooting, killed himself, the AP reported.

On Monday, March 25, the body of 49-year-old Jeremy Richman, the father of 6-year-old Avielle Richman, who was among 20 children and six adults killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting, was found in his Connecticut office building.

Following the Sandy Hook shooting, Richman and his wife created the Avielle Foundation to support research into brain abnormalities that could be linked to violent behavior. The couple also had become advocates for compassion and mental health education.

The three suicides, and their proximity in time to one another, are shocking and tragic, said Heather Huszti, chief psychologist at the Children’s Hospital of Orange County.

“It got me thinking about the contagion of suicide,” she said, adding that when people who are traumatized and are already thinking about suicide read about someone taking their life, it might cause them to go down “that rabbit hole.”

Survivor’s guilt also can be a powerful thing, Huszti said.

“When people go through something random like a mass shooting where there are casualties, they may start to ask: ‘Why them, and not me?’” she said.

When survivors of such a traumatic incident suffer from depression or PTSD, they might start to feel they are not worthy to have survived.

“After such an event, we tend to focus, understandably, on all the accomplishments and great qualities of those who died and talk about what they could’ve become, had they lived,” Huszti said.

Survivor’s guilt is not really a psychological diagnosis, but it can grow out of mental illnesses such as depression or PTSD, she said.

“Depression, for example, leads people to believe they are less worthy, less good,” Huszti said. “You see only the bad in yourself. It’s the thought that it’s terrible you survived and this amazing person did not.”

Teen suicides have spiked all over Southern California over the last year.

On March 5, a 13-year-old boy took his life and was found by a school worker at Don Juan Avila Middle School in Aliso Viejo. A week later, the Orange County Board of Supervisors announced that it will allocate $600,000 to create a countywide suicide prevention program.

Traumatic events change brain chemistry and that can be a significant challenge for young people who are trying to cope with such trauma, said Annette Craig, whose daughter Amber Craig took her life in 2005.

Craig founded the With Hope Foundation in Amber’s memory. The foundation conducts suicide prevention campaigns across Southern California, reaching about 20,000 students each year.

She said when it comes to talking to teenagers about suicide, the questions must be specific.

“You cannot be vague,” she said. “You have to ask: ‘Are you thinking about suicide?’ You cannot be afraid to say the word. When you say the word, you give them permission to say it and talk about it.”

Lack of resources can drive young people to make tragic decisions, Craig said.

“The goal of a suicidal person is to make the pain stop,” she said. “If we don’t give them the resources to deal with the pain, they will take matters into their own hands.”

Parents who lose children as a result of suicide or traumatic events also are extremely vulnerable and at risk, Craig said.

“The grief of losing a child is unimaginable and it’s certainly the most traumatic event I’ve ever been through,” she said. “We have to be aware and educated about what it does to us.”

The first person her foundation saved, Craig says, was her.

“It gave me the opportunity to deal with my grief by helping others,” she said. “I never got over my daughter’s loss. But I learned to live with the weight of it. I learned that grief and joy can co-exist.”

When people are suffering, they usually don’t have the will to ask for help, said Kelly Posner Gerstenhaber, a psychiatry professor at Columbia University who helped lead a suicide prevention event in Parkland soon after the shooting. She also has developed a protocol of questions – starting with, “Have you wished you were dead or wished youcould go to sleep and not wake up?” – that anyone can ask, to help identify individuals who may be at risk for suicide.

“We need to ask about suicide like we ask about blood pressure,” she said.

The best way to prevent suicides is to create an environment and a culture where no one is afraid or embarrassed to talk about it or ask for help, Posner Gerstenhaber said. When you add trauma to the equation, the risk of suicide is even higher, she said.

In such cases, resources need to be constantly available to those who need it, CHOC psychologist Huszti said.

PTSD often doesn’t even occur until six months after a traumatic event, she said.

“By then, people tend to think everyone’s back to normal,” Huszti said. “But then, we don’t take into account kids who don’t have a response soon after, but have it later. By the time that happens, we forget to look for it.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.