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Thursday, March 18, 2004
Helping children cope with tragedy
The eighth-graders in Joyce who witnessed a classmate's suicide are at a particularly delicate stage to deal with such an event, a child-psychiatry expert says.
"For any of us, to watch a person shoot themselves has got to be a very significant trauma," said Elizabeth McCauley, head of the department of child and adolescent psychiatry at Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle.
"But this is a particularly vulnerable group of kids because they're in many ways mature but in other ways, they're still struggling with how to handle really strong emotions."
McCauley said the impact of the suicide on individual children will depend on many factors: how well they knew the boy; what type of emotional baggage they were carrying; how much attention they were paying; and where they were in the classroom when he shot himself.
Their responses will be equally varied, she said.
Some children will talk about the event. Others won't. Nightmares and sleep disturbances will be likely. Some children may become weepy, others jumpy. They could be clingier with their parents and need additional reassurance.
Such responses are typical, McCauley said, but if they persist for more than a month it may be cause for concern. She suggested that parents and teachers watch for symptoms that may indicate longer-term problems, such as:
In coming days and weeks, McCauley said, it's important that the students have an opportunity to grieve through a memorial or other remembrance, and ample time at school to talk about their feelings.
McCauley said it's critical for children to understand that adults will provide help in solving their problems, and to be told how to get that assistance.
It's also crucial that suicide does not become romanticized, McCauley said, as was the case when Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain fatally shot himself in his Seattle home in 1994.
"The important thing," she said, "is to remind them that this is a kid who needed some help, and how can kids get help when they need it?"
She stressed the need for parents to keep firearms stored safely away from children.
"Adolescents are vulnerable to impulsive behavior," McCauley said. "It's part of the nature of adolescence. Picking up a gun or firearm of any sort makes an impulsive behavior too quickly a disaster."
McCauley said that while the boy's death will doubtlessly have lingering effects on the school community, most students who witnessed the tragedy will rebound.
"I'm sure it'll be something they never forget, but in terms of having an impact on their mental health, I'm sure most kids will recover from it," she said.
TRAUMA AND CHILDREN
Advice on dealing with post-traumatic stress in children:helping.apa.org/daily/traumaticstress.
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