ABSTRACT

It is estimated that at least one third of the roughly 30,000 annual suicide victims in the United States have had contact with mental health providers within a year of the suicide, many of them being in active treatment

(Luoma, Martin, & Pearson, 2002). Thus, approximately 10,000 U.S. clinicians per year face the loss of someone with whom they have worked, often intimately and intensively. Given these staggering numbers, there has been surprisingly little written for clinicians, not only on the psychological aftereffects of suicide in general but also on their roles and responsibilities toward the surviving family after such a devastating event. There has been almost no systematic research regarding the costs and benefi ts, either legally or emotionally, of clinicians and families communicating with one another after a death to suicide.