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Sunday, May 11, 2008
Group Helps Those Who Survive Suicide of A Loved One
By Rick Nathanson
Journal Staff Writer
They are the ones left behind to grieve, to tidy up the loose ends, attend to the final affairs. They are the ones forced to ask the hard questions: Why did a loved one commit suicide? Was there anything I missed, something I could have done?
They are the survivors.
Many of them have found solace in a local support group, Survivors of Suicide, or SOS, which will observe the 30th anniversary of its founding with a lunch program at Seasons Rotisserie and Grill on June 1.
SOS was started in 1978 by Richard Schwoebel, whose wife killed herself two years earlier. Although she had been depressed, he said, “I had no idea it would come to something of this nature.” Schwoebel's oldest son, then 16, found his mother in the garage, sitting in her car with the engine running. “It was very tragic, very disturbing,” says Schwoebel, 76, a retired Sandia National Laboratories physicist.
Schwoebel and his two children got counseling at a local church where they met with two pastors. Eventually Schwoebel found other people who had also lost loved ones to suicide. “We began to meet informally a couple of times a month and that evolved into a support group. Then we got mental health officials to come in and talk with the group, and we found survivors who spoke about their own experiences,” he says.
Now incorporated as a nonprofit, SOS meets on the second and last Monday of each month at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Albuquerque. The first of the meetings frequently features guests, including medical and mental health experts, social workers, religious leaders and others. The second meeting is usually a group discussion for people to share personal accounts about suicide and offer advice and support to one another.
In New Mexico there are about 250 suicides each year, one-third of them involving people under age 25, Schwoebel says. Nationwide, there are nearly 33,000 suicides yearly. To put that into perspective he notes that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks killed 3,000 people. “Suicide is like losing a Trade Center worth of people every month year-round,” he says. “The magnitude of suicide has gone unrecognized.”
And for the survivors “it is a life-changing experience,” he says, “and people will need to find others to network with and talk to.”
Marion Waterston recognized how her own story could help others. She moved from New York to Albuquerque in 1995 to live closer to her daughter, then attending school here. Waterston had lost her husband to suicide in 1973 when he was 47, and later a son to suicide in 1990 when he was 19.
Her husband, a psychiatrist, had been suffering from depression. “He was self-medicating but was not under the care of a physician,” she says. He hanged himself in his office, where she found him as their two young children sat in a parked car just outside.
A colleague of her husband's subsequently asked Waterston to start a support group for people who had lost a spouse, regardless of the circumstances. She and a social worker began the group, which became an early model for other crisis support groups.
Tragedy struck again years later when Waterston's son, a freshman in college, hanged himself in a wooded area near a golf course. He had battled depression and chronic pain resulting from a back injury and surgery when he was in high school. Pain pills led to drug abuse. “We got him psychological help, but he never conquered his drug habit or overcame his depression,” Waterston says.
Like throwing a pebble in a pond, suicide has a ripple effect that eventually touches everyone who knew the person, she says. Bobbing in the ripples are the inevitable questions: “Why didn't I see it? Perhaps I could have done something. Why wasn't I nicer to him?” she says. “Truth is, we're not all that powerful.”
When Waterston learned of the SOS group in Albuquerque she reached out to group members to share her experiences.
Among the people who benefitted from that sharing was Carol Argue, who found her husband of 38 years dead in their garage, where he hanged himself.
“He'd been suffering from depression since the early 1990s but had probably been depressed for many years before the diagnosis,” she says.
Argue found SOS through a grief counselor and immediately learned she was not alone. “People shared their stories and they understood what I was going through,” she says. “I don't know how a person could go through the grieving process and try to sort everything out without a group like SOS. They helped me move forward. They helped save my life.”
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