Finding help for a killer

Boston.com / News / Local / Eileen McNamara: "Organizers did not waste their breath asking the audience to turn off cellphones during the opening session of yesterday's Suicide Prevention Conference. The Senate version of the state budget was due to be released in Boston, and everyone from the commissioner of the Department of Youth Services to researchers for the Department of Public Health had one ear cocked for good or bad news.

Budget season is an especially cruel time for human services, pitting the needs of one deserving group against the needs of another in the service of the bottom line. It is a roller-coaster ride from January, when the governor unveils his budget, until July, when the House and Senate are expected to reconcile their competing versions.

More than one worthy cause falls off the track along the way.

The process seemed miles away from the ballroom of a Holiday Inn, where more than 500 people gathered to talk about a public health crisis that took at least 425 lives in Massachusetts in 2002, 2Æ times the number of victims of homicide that year.

''It helps to think of it as the capacity of Fenway Park," Sally Fogerty said of the 30,000 people nationwide who die by their own hand each year. Fogerty is an associate commissioner for DPH, but she spoke as a mother, recalling the moment she found her 24-year-old daughter barely conscious after taking a lethal combination of alcohol and every prescription medication she could find in the house.

''As a parent, what I remember most is the ice cold fear and the guilt," Fogerty said. ''The guilt: What did I do wrong? How could I have missed the signs? The fear: Would she try to it again?"

As her daughter began to recover, Fogerty said her own biggest challenge was learning that she could ''not wrap her up in cotton and lock her in the house."

That is a lesson that Terry Wise thinks every therapist needs to learn, too. After one therapist tricked her into a hospitalization she continues to resent, she has learned to spot those who practice what she calls ''defensive psychology."

Wise said she tried to kill herself in 2000 and learned that ''expecting empathy for a suicide attempt is like killing both parents and asking for sympathy because you are an orphan."

What she needed from a therapist then, what she said every patient needs is ''mutual trust, with the emphasis on mutual."

That can be difficult when a patient refuses to take his medication. That proved to be a fatal trap for Victor Amirault's son, Toby, who took his own life in 2001. A Tufts graduate, Toby Amirault was a writer who thought his medication for manic depression stifled his creativity.

''Our son's suicide has taken us into places we never planned" to go, Amirault said of himself and his wife, Glenda.

Retired from Polaroid, Victor works with families who have lost loved ones to suicide. Despite ''the devastating reach of suicide," he said, ''it is still the elephant in the room, the thing people still can't talk about."

Not everyone wants to talk openly about a loss. Jannette M. McMenamy is an assistant professor at Tufts-New England Medical Center. She is eager to share her research into bereavement and the needs of suicide survivors. She does not want to talk about her brother's death. ''Grief is a very individual journey," she said. ''There is no one-size-fits-all."

What there is, though, is a growing recognition that suicide is not only a private pain but also a public policy issue. How urgent an issue depends on whether you sit in the ballroom at the Holiday Inn or in the Massachusetts State House.

The Senate budget yesterday earmarked $500,000 to DPH for suicide prevention, twice the amount approved by the House. Who knows where the roller coaster will stop on July 1, the start of the fiscal year? Last year, the Legislature appropriated $250,000 after Governor Mitt Romney vetoed the line item entirely.

Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com."