INTERNATIONAL CHILD AND YOUTH CARE NETWORK

29 OCTOBER 2002
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After years of hiding the hurt, young survivors describe how it feels when a parent commits suicide.

Children of suicide reach out to others who have lost a parent

`If only I could have told him how much I wanted him to live, I might have been able to stop him from jumping.' YUKI SAITO Son of a man who committed suicide.

When Kazuhiro Yamaguchi was in junior high school, he came home one day to find his father dead, sitting in a car filled with carbon monoxide. Now, about seven years later, Yamaguchi still recalls the expression on his father's pale face, as though it happened yesterday. ``I still feel that it's me who killed him,'' Yamaguchi says, holding back tears. ``I should have realized he wanted to die.''

Yamaguchi's father was worried about paying back a huge debt he had incurred. Yamaguchi's parents were divorced, and his father had raised Kazuhiro and his two brothers while also caring for his own aging parents. His father shouldered the entire burden, and after a fire gutted their Nagasaki home a decade ago and his own father was in a traffic accident, Yamaguchi's father found himself even deeper in debt.

As banks continued dunning him, the rice farmer must have felt that he had no one to talk to about his problems. All he could do was mutter about wanting to die.

These days, Yamaguchi is able to look back more calmly at his father's suicide, and the 21-year-old Nagasaki University student recognizes his father showed signs of depression. ``I never thought my father would leave his three children because we had no mother,'' Yamaguchi says. So he didn't take his father's comments seriously. Yamaguchi blamed himself for his father's death and later tried to commit suicide himself. After his father's death, Yamaguchi and his brothers decided to move in with their uncle rather than live with their mother.

Yamaguchi never told a soul about his father's suicide. He didn't feel comfortable talking about it-until he found out about a nationwide nonprofit organization called Ashinaga. The largest group of its kind in Japan, Ashinaga has been supporting children who have lost a parent to tragedies including suicide, traffic accidents and illness since it was established in 1988.

Yamaguchi says the group helped save his life, too. Through peer counseling, he has met other youths like himself who have suffered the loss of a parent.

A survey by the group conducted last year showed that in 28.1 percent of cases, the reasons given for the suicide by the families have to do with work-related problems, including layoffs, bankruptcy and unemployment. Another 19.1 percent of suicides had fallen deeply in debt or carried other financial burdens. Because the father is often the breadwinner, the surviving families of men who commit suicide often experience financial hardship. Ashinaga grants scholarships for children to complete high school, vocational school and college. Last year, 1,477 children received Ashinaga aid.

Another 21-year-old university student, Yuki Saito, is also thankful for Ashinaga. He has for years asked himself why he failed to reach out to his father, who jumped from the 13th floor of a building. A victim of the collapsing bubble economy, his father was heavily in debt when he died. He had hoped his life insurance would pay off his debts.

``I regret that I was never sensitive enough to his troubles,'' Saito says. He recalls his father looked pale and depressed on the morning of his death. ``He had his family and his best friend from junior high school nearby, but he had never talked to anyone about his worries. I wish he could have shared his problems with us. If only I could have told him how much I wanted him to live, I might have been able to stop him from jumping.''

Last year alone, nearly 100,000 children under age 20 were left bereft by a parent's suicide, according to a survey conducted by a sociology professor at Kinjo Gakuin University. On average, about 27 children lose their parents to suicide every day. Compared to statistics from 1998, the number of children whose parents committed suicide in 2001 was 8.5 times higher.

Many, like Yamaguchi, blame themselves for their parent's death. Of 95 children in the Ashinaga survey, more than 30 percent blamed themselves.

Shame is another cross that surviving children bear. They hide the cause of their parent's death from others because they are afraid they will be ostracized. Even Saito, who received a scholarship and found peace of mind through Ashinaga, didn't want to use his real name to speak publicly about his history for a long time. But now, Saito and other Ashinaga members have decided it's time to come out of their shells. They recognize the need to identify themselves and to let the public know about the trauma of losing a parent in this devastating way and the discrimination they have felt.

Last year, the group appealed to Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to strengthen government efforts to prevent suicide. In response, in February this year, the government created a suicide prevention measures council staffed by experts in medicine, psychiatry and industrial health to reach out to those thinking of ending it all. Last month, Yamaguchi and Saito attended a council meeting to ask that the government foster an environment where anyone can feel able to reveal their problems. Efforts should be made as well, they said, to expand education to teach young people about ways to avoid depression and suicide.

The council's industry experts want to add mental health counseling at companies and in trauma units at hospitals. They recognize a need to staff emergency rooms with psychiatric teams to treat people who have attempted suicide. Corporations have in recent years begun offering such counseling to employees. The council hopes to increase such efforts and cut the number of suicides from 31,042 in 2001, to its pre-bubble era levels by 2010.

But Yamaguchi sees a wider problem: Men of his father's generation perceive complaining about their concerns as a sign of weakness. Even if counseling is available at work or in their community, men are still reluctant to seek help. Saito ``came out'' because he wants to encourage survivors like himself not to blame themselves. ``I could not face my father's death and kept running away from it,'' Saito says. ``There are so many other children like us. We realized that we were making other survivors feel more anxious about their future by remaining anonymous.

``We should never feel ashamed that our parents committed suicide. We must be strong and live with pride,'' he says.

The survivors hope that by talking about this issue, they might save some lives. ``I must admit that the more I promote the movement, the more miserable and wasteful my father's death seems to me,'' says Yamaguchi. It's too late for his father, but maybe he can help someone else.

``I feel one of my missions is to help reduce the number of suicides in Japan, so no other child has to suffer,'' he said.

By CHIE MATSUMOTO, Asahi Shimbun News Service
http://www.asahi.com/english/weekend/K2002102600182.html