I love the title of J. Christopher Fowler’s article that was published in the current issue (vol 49, issue 1) of Psychotherapy, “Suicide Risk Assessment in Clinical Practice: Pragmatic Guidelines for Imperfect Assessments.” This practice review is thorough and wise. Fowler strikes just the balance between encouraging completeness and responsibility, and acknowledging the limits inherent in [...]
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Thorough and practical article about means-restriction counseling (finally!)
November 11, 2011
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I am a huge fan of Craig Bryan. He, Sharon Stone, and David Rudd (another person whose work I really admire) have just published an article titled, “A Practical, Evidence-Based Approach for Means-Restriction Counseling With Suicidal Patients.” I know I will be recommending this article a lot. Questions about means restriction come up just about [...]
Read moreClinical reflections on Army’s approach in interactive suicide prevention video
October 22, 2008
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A colleague pointed me to a Washington Post article describing an interactive suicide prevention video the Army has produced and will make mandatory for all soldiers. I experimented with the online demo of Beyond the Front, which shows scenes from the life two soldiers and allows the viewer to make choices that either lead toward [...]
Read moreResource re: means restriction in practice
September 22, 2008
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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 moreMeans restriction and impulsivity in fantastic NY Times piece
September 8, 2008
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I have mentioned quite a few NY Times articles in this blog because I think they cover suicide really well. Last month they published a piece in the NY Times Magazine that I keep recommending to people in informal and clinical discussions, so I thought I’d link to it here. Many thanks to my colleague [...]
Read moreIrreverant documentation post
October 12, 2007
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I came across this irreverent, but pretty informative post by the Last Psychiatrist about documentation for patients with suicidal thoughts or behavior. He is writing from the perspective of an acute services physician, but much of what he says applies across settings. Note that the post has ads embedded in it. Besides being annoying, the [...]
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 moreRisk of suicide in young children
June 12, 2007
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There is a lot of material available about assessing for risk of suicide in adolescents, but much less that focuses on small children. Some cases are relatively (and I mean relatively) straightforward, like the child who says he is going to kill himself in anger when he doesn’t get his way. But I have seen [...]
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