Group Helps With Loss After Suicide

This was the first Christmas that Bruce and Lainie Stein didn’t celebrate with their son, Michael.

The handsome and popular 20-year-old, whom they called “Mikey,” skipped school last September, drove his car to a deserted road across the Ventura County line and killed himself with a single bullet to the head.

“There was no note, no why,” said Lainie, of Canoga Park. “We still ask why.”

The Steins’ story is just one of many that actress Mariette Hartley hears as a volunteer facilitator for the group “Survivors After Suicide,” which meets weekly at Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Panorama City.

“A lot of people have a terrible sense of shame [about suicide],” said Hartley, whose father committed suicide when she was 23. “That’s why I try to be as visible as I can.”

When Hartley’s father killed himself in 1963 with a gunshot to the head, she and her mother were in a nearby room having breakfast.

“He called to me to come to the room, saying that he had lost his glasses,” Hartley recalled.

She found the glasses and rejoined her mother in the next room.

“We heard a pop . . . and both of us knew,” she said.

After Hartley’s father was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead, she and her mother returned to their Brentwood apartment to clean up.

“I’m not the only survivor that has lived through those kind of [mental] pictures. It’s a horrible experience,” she said.

Hartley said her parents had made a suicide pact shortly before her father died, and two weeks afterward her mom tried for the third time to take her own life. For all their troubles--which Hartley recognizes today as stemming from mental illness and alcoholism--she instead blamed herself.

“I was on the verge of huge success,” she said. “I was a starlet . . . But then my brain exploded over all of this. I thought to myself, ‘If my success creates this kind of chaos in my family, I’ll just stay underground.’ ”

Hartley did continue to work in film, television and stage but was held back by her own fear of success, she said. Often, she was haunted by her father’s suicide, crouching in a fetal position on the sets of a television western in which she was starring. The popping sounds of prop guns made her flinch--similar to what veterans experience after fighting in wars. She said she heard the fateful sound of her father’s gunshot repeatedly in her head.

For years, she remained silent about the suicide--a promise she kept to her mother. While preparing for a role in a 1985 movie about teenage suicide called “Silence of the Heart,” she met and talked with others who had lost loved ones to suicide.

Opening up about her father’s death was an epiphany, she said.

Soon after, Hartley--who lives in the San Fernando Valley--co-founded the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, which has nine chapters throughout the United States. In 1990, she started leading therapy groups for survivors.

Survivors After Suicide meets weekly for two months. Each Saturday morning, survivors gather in a conference room at the hospital to talk, tell their stories or show pictures of their loved ones. The group of eight recently worked on ways to cope during the holidays.

“He should [have been] there,” Lainie said about this year’s annual Christmas Eve trip to her mother’s home in Palos Verdes Estates.

The Steins had also planned to take Michael to Las Vegas for his 21st birthday in January. Michael’s sister started that tradition on her 21st birthday two years ago.

The group has been a lifeline for the Steins, because friends and relatives are uncomfortable talking about suicide, Bruce said.

“It helps me to be in the group,” he said. “To be with people that have all had the same experience . . . to know I am not alone.”

Group member Maya Wallace, 76, of Woodland Hills, lost both of her adult children to suicide years ago. Her 25-year-old son, who was being treated for schizophrenia, killed himself 20 years ago, and her daughter, also schizophrenic, killed herself six years later at 33, leaving a husband and 2-year-old daughter.

“It’s a long process,” Wallace said of her recent decision to return to a group setting for therapy. “It’s nothing that eight weeks can take care of.”

Wallace hopes to become a facilitator, like Hartley, to ease others through the process of mourning. “You work on this all your life,” she said.

For information on Survivors After Suicide, a program of the Suicide Prevention Center at the Didi Hirsch Community Mental Health Center in Culver City, call (310) 751-5382.

TIPS

Dr. Jay Nagdimon, director of the Suicide Prevention Center of the Didi Hirsch Community Mental Health Center in Culver City, offers these tips:

* Keep watch on friends or loved ones who say they feel suicidal or raise the topic indirectly.

* Be alert to less-direct clues such as marked changes in work or social behavior, including eating and sleeping habits and giving away prized possessions.

* Note increased social isolation, increased use of drugs and alcohol and more risk-taking behaviors.

* If you fear a friend or loved one is going to attempt suicide, call 911, do not leave him alone, help him make an emergency appointment with a mental health professional, and call the Suicide Prevention Center crisis hotline toll-free at (877) 7-CRISIS ([877] 727-4747) for information and resources.

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