Marking Death, Loss, and Sensitive Events
How to record death and year of death, cause of death including suicide, pregnancy loss, and abuse — and how to keep sensitive details private.
Genograms often have to record the hardest parts of a family's history — a death, a pregnancy loss, or a pattern of abuse. GenogramAI has clear, standard notation for each. This guide covers how to mark them accurately, and how to keep sensitive details private when you show the chart to relatives.
Marking a death and the year
- Select the person and open the Inspector.
- Set their status to Deceased. An X is drawn through the symbol.
- Enter the death year (and month, if you have it). GenogramAI displays the age at death automatically.
To show the year on the canvas, open the Display Labels menu (the tag icon in the bottom toolbar) and turn on the Death label. Hiding a label never deletes the data — it only controls what appears on screen.
Recording cause of death, including suicide
There is no special symbol for suicide, overdose, or any other specific cause of death. The convention is the deceased X plus the cause written out. GenogramAI now has a dedicated Cause of death field on the person — mark them deceased as above, then type the cause there. Whether it prints on the canvas is up to you: it stays hidden until you turn on the Cause of death toggle in the Display Labels menu, so the detail is saved with the record even when it isn't shown. (You can still keep especially sensitive specifics in the free-form notes field instead.)
Please write these details with care. A genogram is frequently reviewed alongside living family members, and a blunt cause of death sitting on the canvas can be painful to see. For sensitive causes, leave the Cause of death label toggled off (or keep the detail in notes) rather than showing it as on-canvas text — see the privacy tip below. For the full convention, read the guide at genogramai.com/symbols/suicide.
Pregnancy and pregnancy loss
Pregnancy and losses each have their own small symbol, and here is the part people most often get wrong: the symbol belongs in the sibling row, placed in birth order among the other children. It is not attached to the mother's symbol.
- Pregnancy — a small triangle for a current pregnancy.
- Miscarriage — a small triangle with an X, marking a spontaneous loss.
- Stillbirth — a small version of the person's gender symbol (a square or circle) with an X.
- Abortion — a small triangle with a cross, marking an induced termination.
To add one, place a child in the sibling group where it falls in birth order, then set its status in the Inspector. Keeping these in sequence preserves the true birth order of a family's children. For the exact glyphs and more examples, read genogramai.com/symbols/pregnancy-loss.
Abuse and the direction of violence
Abuse is drawn with a jagged, zig-zag line, and it is directional — the arrow points at the person who was harmed. Physical, sexual, and emotional abuse are separate relationship types, so you can be specific about what happened rather than lumping them together.
- Choose the line tool from the bottom toolbar.
- Click the symbol of the person who caused the harm first, then the symbol of the person harmed.
- In the relationship-type picker that appears, choose the abuse type: physical, sexual, or emotional.
Check that the arrowhead lands on the victim. If it points the wrong way, delete the line and redraw it in the other order. Click the symbol itself, not the name label — zooming in helps in dense areas.
Privacy tip: notes vs. on-canvas text
Anything you type as on-canvas text is visible to everyone who sees the genogram, including relatives in the room. Sensitive details — a cause of death, the specifics of abuse, an abortion — can live in the person's notes instead. Notes stay with the record but out of the picture until you choose to reveal them, which lets you share a clean chart without exposing the most private facts. If you work with real client data, the Clinical plan adds anonymization and zero-knowledge encryption on top of this.