Probably the most difficult patient to provide therapy to is the one who is chronically suicidal. We worry about many aspects of their care, because a patient's death suicide is one of the worst things we can face. First, and foremost, we want to help our patients, and a death by suicide is the most concrete manifestation that we haven’t.
Not only do we feel we failed them, but we are likely to question our own competence, and the rest of the world is likely to question our competence and the therapy we delivered. This includes family and friends of the patient, our colleagues, the public, and the legal system. This underlying anxiety when working with the chronically suicidal patient has a powerful effect on the therapeutic process.
In the webinar Dr. Nick Bendit will provide some didactic information about suicidality, and then explore why patients become suicidal, and what the function of suicidal thoughts and urges are. Dr. Bendit will develop a general psychodynamic hypothesis about the origins of suicidal thoughts, and the relationship between deliberate self harm and suicidal thoughts. He will then differentiate between acute suicidality and chronic suicidality, and briefly outline the different treatment needs of each group. Dr. Bendit will also discuss how the fear of suicide structures the therapy, and influences the therapist’s response. Finally, some important prevailing myths about suicide prediction, assessment and prevention will be described
Webinar Overview & Instructions
Video Working with Suicidal Clients
PPT Slides Working with Suicidal Clients
Assessment Component: Working with Suicidal Clients
About Dr Nick Bendit: Dr Nick Bendit is a staff specialist psychiatrist working at the Centre for Psychotherapy (Newcastle), an outpatient public psychotherapy unit offering long-term psychotherapy for patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) and eating disorders. He treats patients with BPD using the Conversational Model and DBT, as well as supervising mental health clinicians in the management of patients with BPD. He is the current Director of Training of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Psychotherapists (ANZAP). He has published articles on mechanisms of change in psychotherapy, reviewing the effectiveness of DBT in borderline personality disorder, and mechanisms of chronic suicidal thoughts in patients with borderline personality disorder. He has been a co-author on the most recent Australian Clinical Practice Guidelines on deliberate self harm in borderline personality disorder (RANZCP, 2016). He is the co-author of the second-largest randomised clinical trial of the effectiveness of psychotherapy in BPD, comparing DBT and the Conversational Model (Walton et al., 2020).
