Shopping Cart
Your Cart is Empty
Quantity:
Subtotal
Taxes
Shipping
Total
There was an error with PayPalClick here to try again
CelebrateThank you for your business!You should be receiving an order confirmation from Paypal shortly.Exit Shopping Cart

Blog

« Back to Blog « Older Entry | Newer Entry »

Working with suicidal clients

Posted on October 17, 2014 at 5:02 PM
Presentation given by Dr. Eoin Galavan at the Psychological Protection Society, at Aislin Hotel Dublin, 17/10/2014

Here are my notes from this workshop. 

Between 20%and 50% of mental health practitioners will lose a client to suicide during our professional life, depending on the context in which we work. 
 
What characterises the suicidal mind is: they always want to live and they always want to die. We can get caught up in the thinking that because a client called out the ambulance after ingesting medication she didn’t really want to die. It’s important to keep this in mind: both wanting to live and wanting to die.
 
The way we approach suicidality has to be thought out. We can’t throw everything we have at someone. It can be confusing and overwhelming. We do it because we want to be covered.
 
Thomas Joiner model from "Why people die by suicide"
Perceived burdensomness+thwarted belongingness combined with developed fearlessness and ability leads to serious attempt or death by suicide
 
Development of fearlessness – the suicide person has gone through a journey that has allowed them to override the natural instinct for self-preservation and to overcome fear.

Fearlessness of physical injury is developed by habituation – getting used to threat of bodily harm to the point that it no longer provokes fear but may induce states that are pleasurable. One has to suppress or depress the fear response. 
 
Reduction of the fear response through repeated exposure to violence/injury/physical pain/provocation/abuse. Emergence of an opponent process which is the exact opposite reaction to the same stimulus. Eventually overtime the idea of self-harm does no longer evoke the fear response, it evokes feelings of pleasure or calm.
 
Anorexia nervosa is a good example of how habituation works
There is a high rate of suicide in AN (a study looked at 240 women. 9 died of suicide. This is very high). This is because they have already been through a process of habituation and are likely to use incredibly lethal means because they are habituated thr
 
Different channels for habituation: Numbing of the body sensations in young children who are neglected. Physical abuse early in life leaves people with a high level of tolerance for physical pain but little tolerance for psychological pain.
 
It is important to decouple biological death and lethal self injury from the suicidal risk. A ‘slow graceful swan dive into nothingness’ is NOT the same as jumping off a cliff. Suicidal people are not thinking about the actuality of what they are doing. A realistic description awakens the fear response.
 
Societal and cultural expectations and in some countries (US) legal statues which almost state that a counsellor must  stop a suicidal person from killing themselves as if we have that innate capacity.  It works its way up into the legislative and complaint process. In fact, we don’t have that capacity to stop people from killing themselves. We should stop being anxious about that and stop buying into this fantasy. 7% of all suicides occur in psychiatric hospitals under increased surveillance.
 
“Perhaps what makes all of this so complicated is the fact that unlike medicine, surgery or dentistry the mental health clinician is the instrument of care – there is no equipment failure, no pathogen, no virus to otherwise blame. We are the instrument of care; it does not get any more personal than that” (Jobes, 2011)
This impacts on how we feel towards the patient and the therapeutic relationship, which is the most precious thing we have.
 
Israel Orbach – “Therapeutic empathy with the suicidal wish”.
Two elements are always required when we work with the suicidal person. It is important both to empathise with the suicidal wish and at the same time to confront the self-destructiveness and state that biological death is not a solution to life’s problem.
 
 
Outdated model of working with suicidal people was reductionistic. Suicide was seen as symptom of depression involved but this is an insufficient explanation.. The clinician was seen as the ‘expert’ and in a one-up position. Inpatient hospitalization, treating the psychiatric disorder and using of ‘no-suicide’ contracts.
 
There is no evidence that inpatient stays are in and of themselves effective treatment for suicidality. In fact they become risk factors. In fact people are more suicidal when they come out of hospital. The group in society most likely to die by suicide are those who have just left psychiatric hospital. 3 out of 100 will kill themselves. The general population is 15 out of 100.000
There is a belief going around that we can stop people from killing
 
Using the CAMS (Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality) model authored by prof. David Jobes
This is an overall process of clinical assessment, treatment planning and management of suicidal risk with suicidal outpatients.
 
Key component
-       clinical assessment of risk
-       treatment planning around what is most relevant to a person with suicidality.
-       management of suicidal risk
-       advocates a collaborative stance: sitting side by side and putting suicide on the table
-       suicide status form: pain, stress, agitation, hopelessness, self hate
-       identifying reasons for living vs reasons for dying.
-       intensive outpatient care that is suicide specific
-       developing other means of coping and problem solving
-       systematically eliminating the need for suicidal coping
 
Risk assessment:
-       Individual rating their own risk of suicide. We are really bad at guessing where the individual think they are
-       Crisis response plan
-       Separate risk assessment from predition. Risk assessment is NOT prediction.  We are terrible at predicting suicide. It’s such a rare behaviour that it’s very hard to predict even with people who are in a high risk category
-       How invested are they in the plan? What is the intent? Have they got access to means?
-       A risk assessment is simply a best guess – current and static risk factors
-       Clinician’s ‘gut’ intuition needs to be contextualised
-       Risk assessment will dictate the type of treatment and the frequency of contact
-       Most designated high risk are unlikely to kill themselves! (3 out of 100 of those who just come out of psychiatric hosp will kill themselves, but WHICH 3? That is impossible to predict) Many who kill themselves are designated low risk. It’s extremely difficult behaviour to predict.
-       We can’t make people divulge what is going on internally!
-       We shouldn’t be too hard on ourselves if we get it wrong.
When should hospitalisation be considered
   - extremely high risk of suicide
-       is the person at clear and imminent danger of risk
-       person is unwilling to work collaboratively and work at resolving problems and putting suicide behaviour ‘off the table’
When are we negligent?

-       If there is clear and imminent danger by death and we do nothing to try and avert this, that is negligent

Categories: assessment, Borderline Personality Disorder, Diagnosis, Private practice, Suicide

Post a Comment

Oops!

Oops, you forgot something.

Oops!

The words you entered did not match the given text. Please try again.

98 Comments

Categories

Silvia Baba Neal 

/
Lightbox image