After a loss: postvention

If this is you

What postvention means

Postvention is the part of suicide prevention that happens after a death — the support offered to the people left behind. It sits inside prevention rather than beside it, for a reason the centre stated on its own warning-signs page: a suicide death in the family, or the death of a friend, raises risk for the people close to it. Supporting the bereaved is prevention work.

It is also the least visible part of the field. A crisis line is a recognisable thing; a group of eight people meeting in a room every other Tuesday evening is not, and it does not generate statistics, headlines or grant applications easily.

The group

The centre facilitated a support group for people who had lost someone to suicide, named Healing After Suicide, open to anyone bereaved in that way. It met at the centre's own premises, in the evening, on an every-other-week cadence, and it ran for years.

Around it the centre offered what it described plainly: staff available around the clock, in person or by telephone, for people who had experienced the death of someone close. Bereavement contacts were counted in its statistics as their own category, sitting alongside people at risk rather than being folded into them.

The design choices are worth naming because they are the standard ones and they are standard for good reasons. The group is specific to suicide loss rather than general bereavement, because the questions are different — the searching for a cause, the guilt, the anger, and the peculiar social difficulty of a death people do not know how to mention. It is facilitated rather than clinical. And it is open-ended, because there is no schedule on which this resolves.

Language

The centre's material used the term survivors of suicide for the bereaved, which was the standard phrase in the field for decades and is now largely superseded, partly because it collides confusingly with people who have survived their own attempt. Current usage tends toward people bereaved by suicide or suicide loss survivors.

The other language change is more consequential. The centre's later material consistently used died by suicide rather than the older construction that frames the death as a crime, and that shift — away from language implying culpability — is the one most directly linked to whether bereaved people feel able to speak about the death at all.

The archive keeps the centre's own terms when quoting its published material and notes the change here rather than silently rewriting its pages into current usage.

What was on the original page, and why it is not here

The original postvention page was one of the longest on the site, and most of its length was a directory: national survivor organisations, related bereavement organisations and Kansas groups, each with a postal address, a telephone number, sometimes a named contact person and an e-mail address. It bore an update stamp from 2009.

A sixteen-year-old directory of crisis-adjacent contacts is not a resource, it is a hazard. Organisations merge, close, change numbers and move; a named individual who volunteered to take calls about suicide bereavement in 2009 has not consented to receive them in 2026. None of it is reproduced. A short list of current national resources appears on the resources page instead, and the two national bodies the centre pointed to that still exist and still maintain directories are AFSP and the American Association of Suicidology.