Last week, USA Today published an article with this quote:

Suicide is the nation’s 10th leading cause of death, yet experts say training for                  mental health practitioners who treat suicidal patients — psychologists, social                      workers, marriage and family therapists, among others — is dangerously                                inadequate.

That article prompted this post. If you’re a therapist interested in learning more about working with clients who experience suicidal thoughts and behaviors, I hope that you’ll find this useful.

Books

• Brief Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Suicide Prevention by Craig Bryan, Psy.D., ABPP & M. David Rudd, Ph.D., ABPP
• Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder by Marsha Linehan, Ph.D.
• Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Training Manual, Second Edition by Marsha Linehan, Ph.D.
• Helping the Suicidal Person by Stacey Freedenthal, Ph.D., LCSW (also check out her website)
• The Interpersonal Theory of Suicide: Guidance for Working with Clients by Thomas Joiner, Ph.D., Kimberly Van Orden, Ph.D., Tracy Witte, Ph.D., & David Rudd, Ph.D.
• Managing Suicidal Risk, Second Edition: A Collaborative Approach by David Jobes, Ph.D., ABPP

Articles

• Chu et al. (2015). Routinized assessment of suicide risk in clinical practice: An empirically-informed update.
• Cole-King et al. (2013). Suicide mitigation: A compassionate approach to suicide prevention.
• Hom et al. (2019). Suicide attempt survivors’ experiences with mental health care services: A mixed methods study.
• Hom et al. (2020). Suicide attempt survivors’ recommendations for improving mental health treatment for attempt survivors.
• Klonsky et al. (2018). Ideation-to-action theories of suicide: a conceptual and empirical update.

Websites

• American Association of Suicidology
• International Society for the Study of Self-Injury
• Live Through This
• Patient Safety Plan Template