An the end of the night her mother hanged herself, Antonia Goldschmidt woke up feeling bad. The night before, she had sent her a final cell phone message: “Are you still alive?” There had been no reply. In order to be able to fall asleep at all, Goldschmidt attributed her mother’s silence to the argument they had had before. At least that’s what she had told herself: It’s probably because of the argument. But she had feared that this time her mother might actually be dead. After all, she had tried to kill herself nine times in the past four years. “And those are just the times that I know of,” says Goldschmidt.
People who end their lives almost always suffer for a long time beforehand: depression, hospital stays, suicide attempts. “The relatives of such people were usually under enormous stress for years,” says Birgit Wagner, Professor of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy at the Medical School Berlin. The suicide of the mother or father is then the escalation after a long period of high stress.
Antonia Goldschmidt, for example, tells us today, two years after her mother’s death: “I was tense like a feather since her first suicide attempt, I was always afraid for her. That’s why I was no longer a daughter, but withdrew completely.” All the time she tried to stabilize her mother; no situation let her escalate. The day before her suicide, however, the mother deliberately let it come to an argument “in order to be able to pull it off,” the 33-year-old psychotherapist is certain. It took a long time for her to think about it that way.
Parents experience themselves as a burden or burden
In fact, psychotherapy can be an important building block in dealing with a parental suicide when you are at an age when the future is still ahead of you, says Birgit Wagner. After such an act, young adults ask themselves above all: “Why is my father, my mother doing this to me?” Such a suicide has nothing to do with love for the child, and the children are not partly to blame for it either. Questions like: “Why didn’t I behave differently then and then, why didn’t I call again, why did we argue?” are therefore typical, but misleading.
Rather, the reason for the suicide is “that the parents experience themselves as a burden and a burden. They think they make it easier for the family,” Wagner explains. According to a new study, there is often less than 180 minutes between making the decision and actually committing suicide. Recognizing that they have so little influence on such an act because it happens quite unexpectedly within a short time window can relieve the relatives.
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Antonia Goldschmidt, who, like all adult children in this text, actually has a different name, can now believe that she could not have prevented her mother’s suicide. That’s why she doesn’t feel guilty and can speak openly about the crime. But what she always notices is that people cannot accept that a depressed parent was so ill that he or she no longer wanted help. However, according to Goldschmidt, she herself was able to understand and finally accept that her mother no longer wanted to live: “She almost always cried and suffered incredibly, every day was torture for her.” Her mother already had it when she was young had depressive episodes and tried many antidepressants after her husband, Goldschmidt’s father, left her after 35 years of marriage. She had been in clinics for weeks and months. But nothing changed their situation.