DOI: 10.1177/00302228231193184 ISSN: 0030-2228

A Loss by Suicide: The Relationship Between Meaning-Making, Post-Traumatic Growth, and Complicated Grief

Heather Delgado, Jessica Goergen, Jessica Tyler, Heather Windham
  • Life-span and Life-course Studies
  • Critical Care and Intensive Care Medicine
  • Health (social science)

Meaning making has been found useful in processing grief, yet individuals who have experienced a loss by suicide may have difficulty with post-loss adjustment due to the traumatic nature of their loss. Through quantitative study, this article acts as an initial exploratory study and examines the relationship between meaning-making, post-traumatic growth, and complicated grief symptoms in 81 college students from a large university in the United States who have experienced the loss of a loved one to suicide. The results of this study indicated that meaning-making serves as a mediator in the relationship with post-traumatic growth and complicated grief. This finding sheds light on the importance of meaning-making as a possible avenue of interventions for clinical use in bereavement from loss by suicide to treat grief symptoms and lead to post-traumatic growth.

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