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Human consensus dictates that the death of one's child is the quintessential tragedy; when the child has volitionally elected to the, that is, to suicide, the extent of the scattered psychological debris is compounded exponentially. This effect is magnified by the fact that earlier explanations of suicide, such as contagion, reading of lurid novels, a poor school system, and heredity, have been replaced by our current insistence upon psychogenic determinants. This has bequeathed the survivors a mournful legacy of sorrow, guilt, rage, and shame for presumably not stopping a preventable death dirough appropriate love and attention.
It is then further hypothesized that the child has been forced to use the most potent weapon in his or her armamentarium to resolve conflict. Society, resonating to the motivation attributed to the child, may respond to the family in a stigmatizing, accusing, and avoiding manner, so that an already beleaguered family, probably marked by prior disruption and disorganization, must confront its grief withiout the sympathetic support typically afforded survivors. It is understandable that many families choose to keep the fact of suicide secret. Coroners, physicians, and community officials often collude with the parents’ request for silence.
Psychoanalysts, for reasons of their own, seem to share some of mis need to restrict open investigation into Uiis area. I have never heard a case report of a childhood suicide, despite a practice of many years that has always included child patients, as well as participation in a specific training program in child psychoanalysis. Even the topic of childhood depression has been tabooed for a long time.
Has there been a persistent disregard, consciously or unconsciously determined, of the evidence of self-destruction in children? Reluctance, of course, may be only part of the explanation for the dearth of case descriptions; in selecting patients, we may screen out severely self-destructive children. Or there may