Abstract
BackgroundGhana’s socio-cultural landscape proscribes suicidal behaviour, and this has serious ramifications for attempt survivors and their families. The objective of this qualitative study was to understand the experiences of the families of attempt survivors and how they cope with the aftermath of the attempt.MethodsTen families with attempted suicides agreed to participate in the study, hence they were interviewed. The information gathered was manually analyzed according to Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) resulting in three major thematic areas.ResultsThree major themes emerged two of which addressed negative experiences and reactions towards the attempts: Experiencing shame and stigma, and Reactive affect. The third theme addressed the coping resources of these informants under the theme: Surviving the stress of attempt. The specific coping resources included personalized spiritual coping, social support, and avoidance.ConclusionsFamily systems theory is used to explain some of the findings of this study, and the implication for clinical practice and designing postvention programs for families after a suicide attempt are addressed.
Highlights
Ghana’s socio-cultural landscape proscribes suicidal behaviour, and this has serious ramifications for attempt survivors and their families
A few studies have examined the experiences of suicide attempters only [12], but little is known about the experiences of the family following a suicide attempt, the nature of the reactions towards the attempt and how they cope with the attempt [24, 25]
We only report gender and relations of the participant to the attempt survivor (e.g., M-male and F-female, Father, Mother,etc) and age with the quotes
Summary
Three major themes were identified: Experiencing shame and stigma, Reactive affect, and Surviving the stress of attempt. The study further showed that attempt survivor families did not receive much help following the attempt This might reflect both self-stigma (which in some of the cases discouraged informants from seeking help), lack of credible institutionalized professional support and the generalized negative attitudes toward suicide in Ghana. The lack of confidence some informants expressed in seeking help from organized religious groups is an indication that the fear of stigma is leading to isolation and impairing the social network of these family survivors following the act [53]. This stigma may add to the trauma and may make healing of the family survivors’ and even the attempt survivors slow and arduous with potentially poor mental health outcomes. This is consistent with the important need for gatekeeper training, as prevention and intervention technique, identified by WHO [52] report on global suicide prevention
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