There are about 400 suicides every year in the five southeastern Pennsylvania counties. That’s roughly one suicide every 22 hours. Most of these deaths bring together two groups of people under very unpleasant circumstances. These are emergency responders and family members or others close to the victim.

This brief booklet is for both these groups, but especially the Police Officers, Emergency Medical Technicians, and Crisis Intervention Specialists whose duties may:

• Put them at the scene of a recent suicide or
• Require them to notify a family about the loss of a loved one to suicide

Suicides may not occur every day in every community, but police officers, EMTs, and mobile crisis specialists are involved in the aftermath of those that do. Most emergency professionals are not really prepared for dealing with the people and the emotions that they encounter after a suicide.

What do they say? What should they do? How can they help those struggling with this tragedy? How do attitudes about suicide affect behavior? The booklet helps answer these questions and others like them.

The booklet is about postvention, which attempts to reduce the negative consequences that may affect those close to the victim after a suicide has occurred. There are three objectives to any postvention effort:

• Ease the trauma and related effects of the suicide loss
• Prevent the onset of adverse grief reactions and complications
• Minimize the risk of suicidal behavior among those affected

Postvention facilitates recovery of individuals emotionally devastated by a suicide. "Healing" or "getting over it" or "closure" don’t apply in such cases. Recovery means eventually rebuilding a normal life around the loss. This may take help and that’s postvention and first responders can help set the tone for recovery from suicide loss.

A copy of the booklet is available at the following link: