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Awareness Day Dates
Teen Suicide Prevention Week 14th-21st Feb
Bipolar Awareness Day 26th May
Substance Abuse Prevention Day 26th Jun
Mental Health Awareness Month 1st-31st Jul
Panic Awareness Day 10th Jul
World Suicide Prevention Day 10th Sep
World Mental Health Day 10th Oct

To lose a loved one, is the most traumatic experience any human being can suffer. To lose a loved one through suicide, must be the most traumatic of traumatic experiences. You need help to assist you through life’s most difficult and most traumatic journey. And there is help, even though you feel nothing will ever “help” in this most unhappy place and time you find yourself.

The psycho-analyst Sigmund Freud first said “that recovery from grief is achieved by severing ‘unhealthy emotional ties’ with the person who has died and reinvesting in something new – forming a new attachment”.

Then his daughter died.

This was his next analysis: “We know that the acute sorrow we feel after such a loss will run its course, but also that we will remain inconsolable, and will never find a substitute. No matter what may come to take its place, even should it fill that place completely, it remains something else. And that is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating a love that we do not want to abandon. This is an enduring loss for which there is no solace.” You are not alone in your suffering from your unspeakable, indescribable, unbearable, enduring loss.

The “type” of loss has a huge influence on how we grieve. Especially suicide grief is an extremely lonely place to be. Those who once were our closest friends, suddenly become strangers. They do not know how to deal with us. One sometimes feels as if one is contagious. People are uncomfortable with death; with suicide even more so.

Grieving is a journey on which you did not choose to go. Grieving is a process, slow, and painful, but there is help. Please contact your doctor or a specialist to direct you to contacts or places of comfort or counselling, or should you need medical help or counselling.

Below are contact details and websites which can give you more information on depression, suicide, counselling or other related information. If you would like to send a link that you have found useful, please send it to info@survivorsofsuicide.org.za .

  • A guide for help in the first days
    You are not alone. In South Africa about 22 people take their own lives on any given day, with 220 others, per day, who do not “succeed” in their attempt to end their lives. But, nothing can prepare one for the trauma you are experiencing right now.  The first period, especially – when it feels the nightmare will never end – you will need that support in different forms. Do not negate this, even if you feel you do not want to see anything or anyone. You need help, and it is available. Make use of it.
    Read more »

  • Suicide Crisis Line
    0800 567 567; SMS 31393

  • Department of Social Development Substance Abuse Line
    0800 12 13 14; SMS 32312

  • South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG)
    http://www.sadag.co.za/

  • SADAG Mental Health Line
    011 262 6396



  • Cizelle Louw (Clinical Psychology)
    (Practice number: 8616825)
    Tel: 0824155390
    www.caringfamily.co.za
    Dunhillstraat 454, Waterkloof Glen, Pretoria
    cizelle@lantic.net

  • Christine Strydom (B.Soc.W)
    (Practice number: 0391816)
    021 531 8672
    072 457 2368



 

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