3 Reasons Why Children Commit Suicide When They Have Had a Parent do the Same

Loneliness and isolation are triggers to increases not only in suicide but also addiction and domestic violence. Never has the world been in such a state of fear, choas, and anger. Teenagers and men over 45 are at the greatest risk for suicide in today’s world under these specific pressures. 

According to Science Daily, children who lose a parent to suicide are much likely to commit suicide themselves. What is so important in this tragic topic is that it is evident that children do not do what parents say, they ultimately do what their parents do on the big and small things.

What needs to be kept in mind is that children, teenagers especially, need their parents to be as healthy as possible during this time of stress. Children need to see how their parents manage and handle stress in healthy ways so they can learn these coping skills themselves. Suicide and suicidal thoughts are tough subjects but topics children and parents need to discuss. The more open the dialogue can be on tough subjects such as suicide the more one can learn to solve their emotional problems/stressors in healthier ways.

3 Reasons Why Children Commit Suicide When They Have Had a Parent do the Same

1. Viable Option

When a parent, voluntarily or involuntarily (via overdose) kills themselves they are teaching their children that when life becomes unbearable and there feels to be no way out of those intense emotions, that suicide or over-drugging is a viable (maybe not acceptable) way to cope.

Clearly these parents have deep psychological issues/disorders and they are raising children who love them and are still, on some level, symbiotic with their parent. The more psychologically unwell a parent is, typically the more codependent or the more distant their relationships are with their children.

Mental illness often carries with it, selfishness where the parent is self-involved and becoming overly attached and ‘friendly’ with their children making the children feel a pressure to take of their parents emotions and problems, or they can be emotionally unavailable making their child feel needy of their parents love and desperate to receive it. In either case the child is always trying to be better for the parent they lost.

2. Bonding or Reconnection

Missing their parent, post suicide or overdose, may be so intolerable for the children (even adult children) left behind they are not able to process the shock, rejection and abandonment. The child, regardless of age, has been horribly abandoned and because these relationships are typically enmeshed or extremely distant, the children cannot psychologically separate from the deceased parent.

Many of these children fight their urge to commit suicide, and even speak of how it is the most horrible thing anyone can do, and yet, when they reach their levels of tolerance with their own emotional pain, sometimes what they desperately want is that reconnection with their parent.

Bobbi Kristina took her life in the same way her mother did. An acquaintance of mine took her father’s gun, the one he used to kill himself, to kill herself as an adult. The teacher in Orange County who told her students never to commit suicide and talked to them about her father’s suicide went to her school where her students were and they found her dead.

These children are all, in my opinion, searching for love and to reconnect to that parent in the same way their parent abandoned them. Maybe they are feeling a sense of forgiveness for their parent and this is their way to demonstrate that in an irrational and almost childlike fantasy way. They kill themselves as a way to understand the depth of the pain their parent felt because in not being able to handle their own pain, they show their parent…”I understand you and know you understand me, so now we can be together.” In this way it ends all resentment in the relationship for the child for the fantasy of possibly being reunited.

3. Mental Health Issues

Clearly, anyone who voluntarily or involuntarily commits suicide is suffering emotionally and mentally. Whitney Houston was unable to cope with life and used drugs as her escape which ultimately caused her drowning. Bobbi Kristina grew up under two Adult-Child parents who never grew up and both used drugs. She was left in the world not knowing how to be an adult or how to cope with emotion. Both her parents never could teach her due to their own lack of maturity and emotional health.

The girl with her father’s gun had undiagnosed bipolar and would talk about a depression she couldn’t understand but upon suggestion to speak to someone she always denied needing to go. The teacher who preached to her students about not killing themselves and expressing her pain over her father’s suicide kills herself in her classroom where her students could find her. Clearly, there are severe mental health issues going on and these issues, with the help of the trauma experienced by a parents suicide, trickle down to these children and it is tragic.

To the public suicide is senseless and tragic. In many ways I agree. Was that teacher selfish to go to her room and hang herself? To those of who are healthy Yes, she was! Was it in her mind to hurt and harm her students, probably not. Maybe she went there because it was the only place she felt truly loved. We can all be angry because that is also correct as she damaged these children and was an authority who made suicide a viable option for her students.

Suicide is nearly impossible to prevent because the people who follow through on suicide keep it secret and there are usually no overt signs that an impending suicide is coming to be able to help them. They don’t want to be stopped. There maybe is a certain amount of shame in these children of parents who kills themselves that feels if only they were a better more loveable child that their parent could never have so violently abandoned them. That shame may sit in their emotions and not allow them to heal because there is no physical outlet for shame. Our mental health and family communities are often helpless in these situations because warning signs are often not there to be able to intervene.