Survivors are people who need help - who desperately want help - and we look to mental health professionals to assist us in sorting out and making sense of our complicated feelings after the suicide of someone we love.

If we go to a therapist or counselor who is uncomfortable with the subject of death or suicide or both, we know it right away. Our radar is finely tuned. A mental health professional's uneasiness with our grief only serves to reinforce the guilt that we are already feeling and confirms our worst fear that we are somehow to blame for our loved one's death.

Suicide is very dramatic: A person crosses a forbidden boundary and crates a mystery that can never be solved. Those of us touched by a suicide are left behind as witnesses, and when our emotional responses are defined primarly in the context and circumstances of our loved one's death, we feel even more isolated and unsettled.

from the book..Touched by Suicide by Michael Myers, M.D.
and Carla Fine