Roger Cohen has written a moving Op-Ed piece in which he describes the way in which a recent suicide in the Phoenix airport transported him back to his own mother’s decades long battle with suicidal thoughts and attempts.
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NY Times: Short but Troubled Life Ended in Shooting and Suicide
October 12, 2007
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This NYT article about 14 year-old boy who died on Wednesday after critically wounding a teacher and classmates, is a case study in risk for adolescent suicide. Abuse/neglect history, legal trouble, access to weapons, social misfit, recent disciplinary action at school. The temporal proximity of his older brother’s arrest is also striking…again pointing to [...]
Read moreWarning: Non-family Tx may be hazardous to your (family’s) health
October 12, 2007
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A clever article in the September 2007 issue of the Journal of Family Psychology by Jose Szapocznik and Guillermo Prado suggests that “psychosocial treatments with vulnerable populations have the potential to produce negative side effects on families.” The authors reported unexpected findings from three separate studies that compared the efficacy of a family and non-family [...]
Read morePresentation to Board of Wynne Center for Family Research
September 9, 2007
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I presented at the Wynne Center for Family Research (WCFR) board meeting today. I presented about our clinical services and about my work in suicide risk assessment, including how it grew out of experiences with suicidal patients in couples and families. The Center board and the faculty of the WCFR were present. The Board is [...]
Read moreConversation with Paul Quinnett, Founder/CEO of QPR
August 1, 2007
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I talked yesterday with Paul Quinnett, Ph.D. Founder and CEO of the QPR Institute. He has been working in the field of suicide prevention for decades and has developed an excellent set of tools for clinicians. I enjoyed the conversation because Dr. Quinnett is bright, experienced, and passionate about his work, and also because of [...]
Read moreReflecting on Intersections with Knowledge Management, Dave Snowden, and Singapore’s Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning System
April 3, 2007
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Warning: This post starts out a bit far afield from clinical work. My ideas about how it ultimately connect back, but they’re still forming, so this is definitely a “put on your seatbelt” kind of post. For some time, I have been following the work and blog of Dave Snowden, founder of Cognitive Edge. Snowden [...]
Read moreWhere’s the Family?
March 28, 2007
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I was just looking at the post counts on my categories and seeing few posts I have (only 2) family therapy category. I think that reflects the state of the field right now, as well as my own internal conceptual development which is not yet entirely integrated. Two things for sure: 1. Almost everything I’ve [...]
Read more“Truth about self-harm” from MHF in UK
March 20, 2007
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Thanks to a recent link from Psychsplash to the Mental Health Foundation in the U.K., I discovered a helpful publication called “The truth about self-harm.” Here is a description from the website: The booklet is for anyone who wants to understand self-harm among young people – why it happens, how to deal with it, and [...]
Read moreClinician response to violation of the “social contract”
February 7, 2007
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I had a stimulating conversation with a senior colleague in the CSPS yesterday. One part of the conversation centered around what happens for us, as clinicians, when the patient does not fulfill his/her end of the “social contract” that is implied when someone goes to a mental health professional. The assumed contract is that the [...]
Read moreAt the crossroads of family therapy and suicide prevention
January 3, 2007
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I recently led a discussion about “Evidence-based risk assessment: implications for family therapy education, research, and practice?” at the Family Research Roundtable, which is a collaborative venture chaired by Susan McDaniel and Jane Tuttle, and funded by the University Committee on Interdisciplinary Studies. My interest in the nexus between suicidology and family therapy is a [...]
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