Four months after her estranged father took his own life, a 15-year-old girl sits across from me in my consulting room. She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t rage. She doesn’t ask why. She simply tells me she’s tired.
It’s a sentence I hear with increasing frequency — not just from teenagers who have lost a parent, but from those who have lost a friend. In Australia, we speak at length about preventing suicide, and rightly so. But what we rarely talk about are the young people left behind. The sons, daughters, classmates and teammates who wake up the next morning carrying questions they can never get answered. Suicide doesn’t just end one life. It radiates outward — into families, schools, footy teams, group chats, gaming communities and entire peer groups. And those caught in the blast are often the least supported, the least noticed, and the least understood. Whether the person lost is a parent or a close mate, young people often experience grief that is complicated, contradictory and deeply unsettling. Most deaths provoke sadness. Suicide triggers something much more layered. Teenagers ask themselves questions that cut straight to the bone: “Should I have seen the signs?” “Could I have stopped it?” “Was I not worth staying for?” “Why would someone my age do this?” These thoughts aren’t rare; they are overwhelmingly common. And they can be devastating. Research from around the world shows that teens bereaved by suicide — whether of a parent or friend — are at significantly higher risk of anxiety, depression, substance use, school refusal and, most concerning, suicidal ideation. When someone your own age or someone who created you dies this way, it can distort your understanding of what is possible or even thinkable.
For young people who lose a parent they weren’t close to, or a friend they’d recently fallen out with, the emotional maze becomes even more complex. “How do I grieve someone who wasn’t really there?” “Is it wrong to feel numb — or even relieved?” “Am I allowed to be angry at them?” These are normal questions, but because we don’t talk about them, young people often feel they’re grieving “incorrectly”, adding shame to an already overwhelming experience. When a child loses a friend to suicide, parents often feel uncertain, overwhelmed or frightened. They want to say the right thing but fear saying the wrong one. They are grieving too — grieving their child’s innocence, their own sense of safety, the realisation that their teenager’s world is far more complex than they imagined. But teenagers do not need perfect sentences. They need calm. Predictability. Honesty. A sense that the adults around them can withstand powerful emotions without collapsing or panicking. Presence beats perfection every time.
If there is one message I’d deliver to every principal and teacher in Australia, it is this: a student grieving after suicide must not be left to drift. Young people rarely walk into a school office and announce they’re falling apart — they show it through slipping grades, irritability, withdrawal, lateness, zoning out, or simply looking “different” in ways only attentive adults pick up. Whether the loss was a parent or a friend, schools must be actively, deliberately supportive. That means assigning a designated safe adult on staff — someone the student knows they can approach without judgement. It means monitoring academic performance, not to penalise them, but to catch the early signs of struggle. It means maintaining predictable routines, because structure is comforting when the rest of their world feels chaotic.
It also requires compassionate flexibility: extensions where appropriate, reduced homework loads, quiet spaces when needed, and an understanding that emotional dysregulation is part of trauma, not “acting out”. Schools must keep clear lines of communication with home, checking in with parents about mood, sleep, behaviour changes and social dynamics. And most importantly, teachers must understand that a drop in concentration, motivation or behaviour after a suicide is not defiance. It’s grief. It’s the brain’s executive functioning going offline under the weight of trauma.
Doing nothing isn’t neutral. It is, in fact, one of the most damaging responses a school can offer. When adults pull back, assume the young person is coping, or expect them to “soldier on”, students interpret it as a message: no one sees me. Early, proactive support isn’t a luxury — it’s a protective factor that can prevent depression, school refusal, substance use and even further suicide risk. Schools can’t undo the tragedy, but they absolutely can determine whether a young person feels held — or alone — in its aftermath. Our suicide-prevention strategies are improving, but our postvention response in schools — the care for those left behind — is patchy at best. Every child affected by suicide deserves timely counselling, coordinated care, school-based monitoring, follow-up for at least a year. Right now, it’s a postcode lottery. Many receive no formal support at all.
The 15-year-old girl in my office — exhausted, polite and doing her best — deserved more than silence. So do the countless teenagers mourning a friend whose death makes no sense to them. If we truly care about young people, we must stop treating suicide as the end of a story. For those left behind, it is the beginning of a long and vulnerable journey. And we have a moral responsibility to walk it with them. Anything less risks failing them twice.