Conference Agenda

Dorit's daughter in law, Mariana, took her own life during a psychosis, in 2016. It was a first episode that had included a Mental Health Act assessment the night before her death.

Dorit will talk about her attempts to make meaning of this trauma initially and later on. Her talk will include the additional trauma of making and reading statements to the Coroner, the way that different narratives of blame emerged, some of which could not be shifted, and how for her, she could not find language to express her grief and distress, but did find relief in painting and in her art group witnessing her paintings without comment or judgement. (We could show 2 of the paintings that Maddie took)

Like so many other families affected by traumatic death, Dorit tried to make meaning by pushing for change and improvements in services. Dorit got funding to co-create learning resources for health professionals, volunteering with Making Families Count. Through that work, Dorit met Rachel and began to read her published articles for professionals. She found these articles really helpful, and has been volunteering with Rachel and others to produce resources that are aimed at families and friends. (And here we could showcase the resources)

Dorit is now CE of Making Families Count, (MFC). MFC is a not-for-profit community interest company. We provide training, consultancy and advocacy to improve how public services respond to families after serious harm or death. We promote compassionate, transparent and learning orientated approaches within health and social care systems.

An inquest is an inquisitorial process in which the coroner determines who, when, where, and how a person has died following an unexpected death. When a suspected suicide involves someone recently under the care of mental health services, clinicians may be called to give evidence. Despite the profound impact that a poorly conducted inquest can have on all those present, little is known about the experiential dimension of attending an inquest—what makes it more or less difficult, and whether it holds any reparative potential.

This presentation draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at inquests following suspected suicide. The findings foreground the emotional and relational dynamics of attending court, suggesting that grief is the most present participant in the inquest process. When conducted well, an inquest becomes a participatory encounter: a relational space in which family grief can be witnessed and in which coherent narratives of understanding can take shape. The coroner sits at the centre of this process, responsible for sustaining narrative coherence and providing emotional containment.

When narrative oversight fails or grief overwhelms containment, the participatory process can break down. In these instances, adversarial thinking and dichotomous frameworks may replace reflective capacity. The emotional dynamics present during the inquest are the central feature of both its challenge and opportunity for repair. Furthering understanding of these often-unacknowledged experiences could inform better preparation, guidance, and support.

When someone dies by suicide, those left behind face a psychic catastrophe that shatters assumptions about life, love, and responsibility. Across more than 1,500 testimonies from families, friends, and clinicians, clear patterns emerge: the mind seeks relief from unbearable uncertainty by creating narratives of blame—often directed inward. These delusional stories, though protective at first, entrap the bereaved in cycles of guilt, defensiveness, and self-punishment, obstructing mourning and distorting institutional responses.

Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and lived experience, this paper explores the psychodynamics of suicide loss and the collective need to restore truth where fantasy and fear prevail. The presentation will trace how understanding these processes has informed national guidance and creative collaborations with bereaved families, including the co-authored resource Making Sense After a Suicide.

In this work, the aim is not to remove pain but to make it thinkable—to shift from blame to reflection, from silence to dialogue. By recognising that suicide cannot be reduced to a single cause or failure, we open space for compassion and meaning-making. Facing the reality of suicide—its complexity, destructiveness, and humanity—allows mourning to resume and transforms unbearable guilt into shared understanding.

: In 2017, John experienced the loss of his youngest son to suicide. The resulting trauma and mental health difficulties led to a decline in motivation and, combined with limited workplace flexibility, culminated in early retirement. Support from friends and family played a vital role during this period. Additionally, attending the Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide (SoBS) peer support group was invaluable in helping process and contextualise the loss. Subsequently, John became a peer support group volunteer facilitator and is now the Vice Chair and Research Lead for the SoBS board of trustees. He has also embarked upon a program of research into adult male bereavement, primarily focussed on the barriers and facilitators of participation in postvention support activities.

John’s research has helped elucidate the complexity of suicide bereavement and highlight the many interwoven facets that can often be neglected or ignored when the needs of suicide loss survivors (SLS) are being considered. A combination of personal experiences and interactions with many other SLS have highlighted aspects such as organisational stonewalling, stigma, guilt, blame, societal denial, and permanently conflicting perspectives.

In this presentation, the focus will be on the inherent revisiting of prior trauma when dealing with the loss of a loved one to suicide. It is part of the human condition to mentally partition events associated with strongly negative experiences. Indeed, a common reaction is to build a mental dam to hold back the potentially overwhelming angst associated with suicide loss. However, such a dam may develop cracks, or fail completely, allowing a flood of overpowering emotions that can also elicit reliving of previous experiences. Connected by both the emotional connectivity and connotations of events, the trauma of the present and past can become intrinsically linked and manifest jointly. How these may be teased out and confronted will be discussed.

How is it possible to speak about suicide when what suicide provokes is an unanswerable, why? When the voice of the one I long for, and sometimes fear, is forever silenced? As a father bereaved by the suicide of his son, as facilitator of a survivors of suicide bereavement group for over 10 years, and as an anthropologist, David (Prof David Mosse) will share thoughts on how suicide can question what we think we know about human agency and love; and how investing in the future requires finding a narrative for the past. He will share his understanding of how those bereaved by suicide find stories from each other’s tragedies, and how these stories of loss change over time. Some things we understand about suicide only come from the experience of suicide grief. His experience tells him that despite shifting public and health frameworks, it is impossible to escape suicide’s moral dimension, and that grief is also ethical recovery. He will reflect on the way suicide grief also has power for change. This is born of anger or the fight against powerlessness and meaninglessness, but also because of the social and institutional anxiety that surrounds suicide. But without dialogue, the dynamic power of grief can be personally and organisationally destructive. David brings an autoethnographic perspective that places personal experience in a wider social and cultural context.