Esra’s Reviews > Working in the Dark: Understanding the pre-suicide state of mind > Status Update

I think that, lacking fundamental emotional engagement with my
mother, I had been suicidal at some level since my childhood. The
children of the family were not encouraged to express or share emotion,
and any negative feelings were greeted with impatience or outright
anger, with only intermittent and unpredictable parental affection
shown

There is frequently a kind of inner peace and a sense of
control that accompanies the formation of a suicide plan. Any sudden
change in the patient’s affective state towards a relaxation or calm,
rather than necessarily being an indication of improvement, should alert
the practitioner that the patient may have formulated a suicide plan.

Many suicidal
patients suffer from poor self-esteem, are severely self-critical and feel
themselves to be failures. An actual failure, for example getting sacked
or failing an examination, is a danger signal because it is experienced as
confirmation by the outside world of what the patient feels about himself.

Two months before Mr Adams’ suicide attempt, his mother had tried to
kill herself by taking a massive overdose. Actual or attempted suicide by
a parent or close relative may well precipitate a suicide attempt by a
spouse, son or daughter.

The patient who habitually deals with internal conflicts via
external action will be more vulnerable to acting on a suicidal impulse
when he is unable to make use of the activity that provides relief

A split-off part
of the child identifies with the aggressor, the mother, who they feel has
abandoned them to die or intrusively dominated them with inappropriate
feeds. In this unconscious state of mind the body, representing a bad,
greedy child-self, is attacked. The most severe cases of eating disorders,
like anorexia nervosa and bulimia, are covertly suicidal

persistent anxiety about abandonment or engulfment by
mother may arouse irreconcilable hostility towards the mother and lead
the adolescent girl to attack the mother’s sadistic feeding behaviour by
taking over the feeding function, controlling intake, or actively rejecting
food by refusing to eat or vomiting what has been taken in.

Adolescence is also a time of action as the
adolescent experiments with new behaviour and exercises omnipotent
fantasies. When the adolescent’s body is experienced as the source of
maddening thoughts and feelings, it may become the target of an active
attack in the form of cutting and suicide, or more covert suicide in
anorexia nervosa.

The child wants to rob his parents of their greatest and most precious
possession, his own life. The child knows that thereby he will inflict the
greatest pain. Thus, the punishment the child imposes upon himself is
simultaneously punishment he imposes on the instigators of his
sufferings’ (

The Oedipal girl is faced with a different task, namely, to change the
object of desire from mother to father. In so doing, her link to the primary
object is severed with the resultant anxieties of separation and retaliation