UPDATED: The Call of Darkness: Managing Suicidality in Clinical Practice

The White House has declared suicide to be a national and international epidemic and has mandated suicide prevention training for educational and health workers nationwide. This class is in response to that mandate.

This intermediate to advanced course for mental health professionals begins with the awareness that our ability to predict suicide is little better than chance and that at present there are no consistently reliable empirically validated treatment techniques to prevent suicide. However, Dr. Hedges will demonstrate that in the past three decades much has been learned about the dynamics of suicide and many promising treatment approaches have been advanced that are slowly yielding clinical as well as empirical results.

Dr. Hedges will present the groundbreaking work on suicidality of Freud, Jung, Menninger and Shneidman as well as the more recent work of Linehan, Kernberg, Joiner and the attachment theorists along with the features in common that these treatment approaches seem to share. He will put forth a Relational Listening approach regarding the origins of suicidality in a relational/developmental context and will consider their implications for treating, and managing suicidality.

The tendencies towards blame and self-blame on the part of survivors raise issues of professional responsibility: accurate assessment, thorough documentation, appropriate standards of care, and liability management—all of which will be covered in this course.