At a recent workshop I presented, a senior colleague commented that our clinical vernacular needs a more apt phrase than “high risk” to describe individuals whose clinical and historical presentation suggests risk for suicide. “High risk for suicide,” he pointed out, sounds like suicide is probable, when in fact the likelihood of suicide in [...]
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Teaching and learning at New York State psychiatric facilities
April 28, 2008
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I’ve returned from a fascinating series of trips to two New York State psychiatric facilities (St. Lawrence Psychiatric and Pilgrim Psychiatric), as part of a project I’m working on with the Office of Mental Health. I learned a great deal from talking about suicide risk with over 500 clinicians from a variety of disciplines and [...]
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 moreConversation with Michelle Lang, Ph.D. of RFMH
September 18, 2007
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I had an interesting conversation a few weeks ago with Michelle Lang, PhD, a colleague with the New York State Research Foundation for Mental Hygiene. RFMH is essentially the research and program evaluation arm of the NYS Office of Mental Health. Dr. Lang has completed a pilot study on the feasibility of routine suicidality screening [...]
Read morePossible implications of findings re: visual memory
August 27, 2007
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Readers of this blog know that I am interested in mindmapping and other visual presentation strategies as tools for training clinicians in suicide risk assessment (see related posts listed below). In a previous post marked “needs development” I noted: Really, there is a “basic science” set of questions about learning and the clinician mind that [...]
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 moreVisual maps and guides in high stress situations
May 8, 2007
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I had a stimulating conversation about the directions my work is heading with two of my mentors last week. One part of the conversation was about further examining the potential of visual mapping in clinical teaching, especially in the area of suicide risk assessment. I need to understand the cognitive science of mapping more. One [...]
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 [...]
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