Domestic abuse-suicide link strong

Within the field of domestic violence, what may sound like overly dramatic emotionality to the rest of the world -- "If I can't go on, she doesn't deserve to live" -- clangs like a battering gong.

Abusers often express suicidal thoughts before trying to kill current or former partners, a new study finds. And abuse victims, it adds, are themselves at increased risk for self-harm.

The report, "If I Had One More Day," released this week by the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence, is among a handful of studies attempting to quantify a link between domestic abuse and suicide, though counselors say they have long recognized its presence.

"We had heard people saying there was a connection between domestic abuse and suicide, so we wanted to look a little deeper," said Kelly Starr, fatality review coordinator for the coalition.

What she found, after examining 113 domestic violence deaths occurring between July 2004 and June 2006, appeared significant. Of them, 48 were women killed by a current or former husband or boyfriend. Ten more were children. The report also included 26 men who committed suicide -- often after attempting homicide.

That's what happened in a First Hill apartment Dec. 9, when a 41-year-old man came home drunk, argued with his girlfriend and then shot her with a .22 caliber semiautomatic handgun. Afterward, he put the gun to his head. When police officers arrived, they found the couple's young son sobbing in the apartment near his mother.

The woman, though badly injured, survived. The man died on the bedroom floor, his gun beneath him.

Mark Adams, who leads batter-therapy sessions at the Domestic Violence Intervention Program of Family Services, has heard many such stories.

"If an abuser is suicidal, rarely do they commit suicide without taking someone else with them," he said.

Those who work with victims of domestic violence say that even when suicidal batterers do not succeed in committing physical violence against a victim, they often exact brutal manipulation. Merril Cousin, executive director of the King County Domestic Violence Council, recalled one case in which a batterer killed himself while on the phone with his estranged partner. In another, the abuser committed suicide in a public area while calling the name of his ex.

"It was clearly intended to inflict emotional damage to the victim," Cousin said.

Family Services screens every potential client -- the vast majority of them referred through the criminal courts -- for such risks, and duly warns current or former wives and girlfriends to set up a safety plan, Adams said.

But Starr has concerns about how infrequently such interventions occur. Privacy and confidentiality laws often prevent such essential information from getting to those who need it, she said.

Such was the experience of Suzanne Dawson, 53, whose ex-husband killed their two daughters during a weekend visit in 2004, and then killed himself. She had long been concerned about his mental health and increasing rage, discussing this with child support workers, therapists, lawyers and court officials.

"But they couldn't talk to each other," she said. "I think we're really at a bad place with confidentiality and privacy issues. We've made it so that people are afraid to talk about what they see when there's something wrong."

Chris Johnson, policy director for state Attorney General Rob McKenna, said the problems cut both ways. He has heard abuse victims complaining that confidentiality laws work against them, as in Dawson's case, while others worry that their personal information is still too easily available.

Because most suicide prevention programs work on behalf of their clients -- those preoccupied with self-harm -- therapists are less often trained to think about the ramifications for a partner. But those who work with victims of domestic violence say they have long understood the abuse-suicide pattern -- at least anecdotally.

The recent report found, for instance, that of 457 men who killed themselves in 2003, 87 -- or about 19 percent -- had a documented history of abusing an intimate partner. The report also seeks to identify a suicide link for victims.

Far more women die each year by their own hands than by homicide, so to explore the issue researchers read death certificates for each suicide in 2003 and cross-referenced them with court records to discern which had documented histories of domestic violence.

Of 161 women who committed suicide that year, 16 had reported domestic abuse -- though researchers believe the number is likely higher because many victims of intimate-partner violence never inform police.

Barbara Hope, executive director of Eastside Domestic Violence, agrees.

"Women get desperate and don't see any other alternative," she said. "It's something that we've known for a long time does happen, but we're not spending enough time discussing or talking about it."

Hope's agency, now going into its 25th year, has seen its numbers grow annually -- as a result both of more abuse reporting and, she suspects, more actual abuse. The newest clients, Hope said, are teenagers.

"As many services as we can provide, people are using them. For every one person we take into our emergency shelter, 15 are turned away," she said.

The report, which will be available online by week's end, urges greater collaboration between mental health professionals and domestic violence therapists, calling for increased awareness of the potential link between domestic violence and suicide.

"In so many of these situations," said Cousin, of the domestic violence council, "these aren't just suicides, they are murder-suicides."

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