"The more we talk about these events, the more helpful it is for us as clinicians and as humans going through such a sad and difficult thing," she says.Īvoid extreme reactions. She also talked to supervisors, friends and colleagues and eventually sought therapy to come to terms with the situation. Task force members who had lost clients to suicide provided "a lot of warmth and validation," Sobik says. One especially helpful resource, she says, was the Clinician Survivor Task Force of the American Association of Suicidology (AAS), an organization dedicated to understanding and preventing suicide. "The most healing part for me was talking to others who had been through a similar situation, and were now on the other side," says Sobik. Finding good supervisors, mentors and others to help you is by far the most important thing you can do following a client's suicide, experts agree. If it happens under your watch, experts urge you to: That said, there are many resources available to help students cope and even grow in the face of this trauma. "There are a few evidence-based treatments that work for suicidal behavior, and graduate students should be routinely trained in them," says University of Washington suicide expert Marsha Linehan, PhD. Others feel existing training isn't enough to prepare students for working with these clients, who often have complex and deep-seated problems. Only half of trainees in the 2003 survey said they attended programs with formal training, for example. Unfortunately, some graduate programs don't adequately train students in suicide and suicide prevention. "The more experience you get, the more you realize that while therapy can be helpful and useful, it is not always a panacea," Eells says. About half of psychiatrists, who tend to see more severely troubled patients, experience such a loss, research finds.Ĭlient suicide often strikes trainees more deeply than seasoned clinicians, because students tend to be more idealistic about therapy's benefits and less experienced in dealing with very troubled clients, says Gregory Eells, PhD, director of counseling and psychological services at Cornell University. Over time the number rises, so that one in four psychologists loses a client to suicide at some point in his or her career. 2) found that 5 percent experienced a client suicide, although 99 percent said they had treated at least one suicidal client during training. A 2003 survey of 238 predoctoral psychology interns in Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior (Vol. Sobik's experience is rare, at least in graduate school. "As a young therapist, it forced me to grow up really quickly." "I was unprepared for how shattered I felt, both personally and professionally," she says. Still, Sobik wasn't ready for her intense reaction to the woman's suicide. Sobik's client had struggled with severe depression and attempted to kill herself before. "I didn't realize just how painful it would be," says Sobik, now a psychologist at James Madison University's counseling and student development center. Last year, Laura Sobik, PhD, was finishing her internship at Texas Women's University when she received the news: A client she had worked with for two months had killed herself.
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