Left Behind: Surviving Suicide Loss

SUMMARY

The guided use of selected books as an adjunct to treatment is applicable to patients in all stages of life and with a variety of problems.¹

The book Left Behind: Surviving Suicide Loss written by Nandini Murali leaves a deep impact in our hearts.² A senior psychiatrist Dr Raguram introduced this book to me. The author has shared her traumatic grief reaction to an unnatural death. She takes the reader through the overwhelming emotional turmoil for the first few years and its impact on her life. She writes, “A cocktail of toxic emotions throttled me—shame, fear, guilt, anger, and remorse. They would ambush me with the stealth and ruthlessness of an apex predator.” She overcomes it with courage, compassion, and connection. Courage as she explains is “acceptance of one’s vulnerabilities and is a key factor for authenticity.” She shares how she was helped by her support groups and expresses her gratitude toward her family, friends, her two dogs (Mali and Minnal), her servants, people she met while exploring her pain, her spiritual guru, and suicide survivors she met in her journey of pain to purpose. This compassion of others with whom she felt connection was vital to explore herself. In her journey of seeking the meaning of the pain, she found spiritual practices and group therapy were similarly helpful. She courageously and scientifically explains the pain she underwent had its manifestation at her physical, emotional, and psychic grounds. She ferociously searched for help and experienced that the Shradh ceremony along with group therapy and psychiatric medicines have their part and were helpful. She believes every suicide is unique and not only family but significant others also go through grief and how stigma blocks the usual grief reaction. She expresses how the stigma around suicide is prevalent and her observation and experience that even mental health professionals lack adequate empathy. She comments on the magnitude of death by suicide by use of statistical data and how this problem has become a social issue. She talks about the need of training programs like suicide gatekeepers at a community level. One year of her husband’s death, she launched SPEAK—an initiative to prevent suicide and promote mental health. She teaches from her experience and as an expert of language regarding communication skills to be used with suicide survivors “what to say and what not to say.” She is a perfect example who searched for the meaning of suicide in her life. Her journey from turbulent ocean to shore guides the reader to introspect their emotional wreck at a painful situation and to deal with them directly without shame and secrecy. She shares experiences of other grieved families in different circumstances and finds that every suicide survivor needs validation of their emotional pain and unconditional support from society. The book offers much more than we expect and acts as a guide for people in grief. The book is based on her experiential introspection as well as massive research on the topic. Also she has substantiated the truth by personally meeting authors and other suicide survivors.