A group of US and UK colleagues have published an interesting qualitative study about the challenges and resiliency of military mental health professionals (MMHPs). They had a small non-representative sample of British MMHPs who had completed a period of deployment in Iraq between 2003-2005. For the study, they participated in detailed interviews about their experiences [...]
Read more
Archive | health care delivery RSS feed for this section
Resource re: means restriction in practice
September 22, 2008
2 Comments
I’ve had a nice response to the brief commentary I posted in conjunction with a link to the NY Times article about means restriction. In light of that, I thought I’d post a link to the a site called Means Matter, which is published by the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. The site has summary [...]
Read moreWarning: Non-family Tx may be hazardous to your (family’s) health
October 12, 2007
0 Comments
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 moreThoughts about SAD PERSONS Screen
August 27, 2007
6 Comments
I’ve gotten a few questions from colleagues and trainees lately about using the SADPERSONS screen. Most recently, a colleague pointed me to an article in Psychiatric Times titled, “APA: Simple Screen Improves Suicide Risk Assessment.” The topic seems worthy of a post to think through both the appeal and risks of the SADPERSONS scale. For [...]
Read moreTreatment teams as “Communities of Practice”
April 4, 2007
0 Comments
Still thinking about the intersection of clinical practice, risk assessment, knowledge management (KM), and Dave Snowden, which I blogged about yesterday. In KM world, what mental health clinicians call a “treatment team” could be considered a Community of Practice. There are many definitions of this term and treatment teams fit some more than others. But [...]
Read moreWhere’s the Family?
March 28, 2007
1 Comment
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 moreOrganizational factors that support care of suicidal person
March 7, 2007
1 Comment
Wendi Cross, a gifted and innovative colleague in our department, presented at our Family Research Roundtable yesterday. One of the ways she is contributing to the field is to raise awareness about, and develop methodology to study, the factors surrounding implementation of an evidence-based intervention (be it training, prevention, or therapeutic intervention) that influence its [...]
Read moreStandardizing Risk Assessment Documentation
January 30, 2007
0 Comments
There are no established formats for documenting a formulation of suicide risk. I have taken some steps to standardize this documentation in the clinical service I direct, but it needs further development. I’ll be helping our department arrive at a common format. Thankfully, I’ll be working with some really bright people who can view this [...]
Read moreHow we think about Primary Care “Gatekeepers”
January 27, 2007
0 Comments
Primary care physicians are often grouped in as “gatekeepers,” who need to be able to ask about suicide, know warning signs, and refer. The tend not to get in-depth training about formulating or documenting risk assessments. The problem with this “gatekeeper” view is that we don’t have the kind of seamless system that allows the [...]
Read moreAt the crossroads of family therapy and suicide prevention
January 3, 2007
0 Comments
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 [...]
Read more
