Strategies for Integrating Traditional and Strengths-Based Approaches to Suicide

Traditional suicide assessment tends to be a top-down information-gathering process wherein healthcare professionals use questionnaires and clinical interviews to determine patient suicide risk. In contrast, strengths-based suicide assessments emphasize provider-patient collaboration and emphasize safety planning. In this workshop, we will review the state of suicide assessment science from traditional and strengths-based perspectives, with an emphasis on practical strategies that providers can immediately integrate into their clinical practice. Assessment strategies will be illustrated through vignettes, demonstrations, and video-clips.

Traditional suicide assessment emphasizes the use of standardized questionnaires (e.g., the PHQ-9, the Columbia), sometimes along with a brief suicide assessment interview. Researchers and practitioners have identified many problems with this traditional, medical model, suicide assessment approach. First, patients often don’t like the experience (e.g., too sterile) and they may feel pathologized. Second, some research indicates that 15-20% of people who are administered a suicide assessment protocol actually feel emotionally worse afterward. Third, there’s little to no empirical evidence indicating that traditional assessment protocols work for categorizing patient risk. Because of these problems, many contemporary suicidologists and practitioners emphasize using collaborative assessment approaches (e.g., Bryan, Jobes, Linehan, Sommers-Flanagan, etc.). In this workshop, the differences between these two orientations or approaches to collecting suicide assessment data are described. . . and then several collaborative, strengths-based tools are illustrated/demonstrated so that practitioners can learn to complement traditional assessments with tools and strategies that are more engaging and patient/client friendly.