Encountering the Body at the Site of the Suicide: A Population‐Based Survey in Sweden |
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| Authors: | Pernilla Omerov PhD Rossana Pettersen PhD David Titelman PhD Tommy Nyberg MSc Gunnar Steineck PhD Atle Dyregrov PhD Ullakarin Nyberg PhD |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Stockholm Centre for Psychiatric Research, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden;2. Division of Clinical Cancer Epidemiology, Department of Oncology–Pathology, Karolinska Institutet, Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden;3. The Department of Health Care Sciences, Ersta Sk?ndal University College, Stockholm, Sweden;4. National Centre for 5. Suicide Research and Prevention of Mental Ill‐Health, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden;6. Center for Crisis Psychology, Bergen, Norway;7. Institute of Clinical Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway |
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| Abstract: | Encountering the body of a child who died by suicide at the site of death is believed to be especially harmful for bereaved parents. We investigated the association between encountering the body at the site of the suicide and psychological distress in 666 suicide‐bereaved parents. Parents who had encountered their child's body at the site of the suicide (n = 147) did not have a higher risk of nightmares (relative risk RR] 0.95, 95% confidence interval CI] 0.67–1.35), intrusive memories (RR 0.97, 95% CI 0.84–1.13), avoidance of thoughts (RR 0.97, 95% CI 0.74–1.27), avoidance of places or things (RR 0.91, 95% CI 0.66–1.25), anxiety (RR 0.93, 95% CI 0.64–1.33), or depression (RR 0.94, 95% CI 0.63–1.42) compared with parents who had not encountered the body (n = 512). Our results suggest that losing a child by suicide is sufficiently disastrous by itself to elicit posttraumatic responses or psychiatric morbidity whether or not the parent has encountered the deceased child at the site of death. |
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