The Personal Impact of Uncompleted Suicide on Partners: Transformations for Better, for Worse
Year: 2014
Type: other
Abstract: Research to date in the area of suicidology has paid very little attention to partners of those who attempt suicide.The few studies that have accessed partners have done so as part of a larger cohort of 'significant others' in order to either explore the role of care provision to those at risk of suicide or to advance assessment and intervention strategies for suicide attempters.There is an incomplete picture, therefore, of the personal impact of an uncompleted suicide specifically for partners.The study aimed to ( 1) explore the lived experience of living with a partner following an uncompleted suicide and (2) to examine the meaning that partners attributed to an uncompleted suicide and the significance of these meanings for their everyday lives.Five individuals exposed for the first time to an uncompleted suicide were interviewed using a semi-structured interview schedule.Interviews were transcribed and analysed using an interpretative phenomenological framework.The super-ordinate theme "I'm not the same person I was": transformations for better, for worse, reflected the transformative impact of a partner's suicide attempt for individuals with both negative and positive trajectories.The overarching theme of transformation evoked three sub-themes namely, "It put nearly ten years on my life": suffering the trauma of the attempt; "It shifted the whole world on its axis": adjusting in the wake of the attempt; and "It never ever goes away": the legacy of the attempt.This study contributes to the field of psychotherapy by recognising the transformative impact on partners as traumatic, and identifying potential psychotherapeutic pathways for both individual and/or couples therapy including reactivation of adverse childhood experience, ambiguous loss, boundary ambiguity, attachment injury, and posttraumatic growth.Implications for training and future research are also discussed as well as recommendations for practice and policy.
Author: Francis Edward McGivern
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W200169936