Helping the Suicidal Person: Tips and Techniques for Professionals provides a practical toolbox that mental health professionals can start using immediately with clients thinking of suicide. Many books focus only on suicide risk assessment or on a single therapeutic framework. In contrast, Helping the Suicidal Person incorporates tips and techniques from an array of evidence-based therapies [...]
SpeakingOfSuicide.com is a website for anyone touched in any way by suicide - people who think of suicide, people who have attempted suicide, people who have lost someone to suicide, and the professionals who help all of the above. Although many of Speaking of Suicide's site's posts are geared toward lay people, there is a [...]
Many activities are planned during Suicide Prevention Week, which follows Suicide Prevention Day (Sept. 10). One is a webinar on Wednesday, Sept. 13, by John Draper, who has directed the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (800-273-TALK) since 2004. According to the group PsychAlive, "Dr. Draper will discuss how we can amplify and magnetize [...]
Over at my site SpeakingOfSuicide.com, I discuss a question to ask your suicidal clients: What stops you? I also discuss why some people are reluctant to ask this question, and why it is so important to ask, regardless. Check it out here: “What Stops You from Killing Yourself?”
Sometimes, it can be a challenge to maintain hope for someone who feels utterly hopeless. Their situation might seem so bleak, their pain so intense, their stress or trauma so unbearable, their desire to die so strong, that you begin to think your efforts are futile. Sadly, hopelessness is often contagious, and the hopelessness of [...]
Too many mental health professionals have too little education in suicide assessment and intervention. I discuss this lamentable state on my other website, in a post titled “Woefully Inadequate”: Suicide Prevention Training in Graduate Schools. Yet even the uncommon clinician with excellent training in helping suicidal individuals always has more to learn. When [...]
