Suicide: Guidelines for Assessment, Management and Treatment

Each year almost 30,000 individuals take their own lives, making suicide the eighth leading cause of death in the United States. The data on completed suicide become all the more disturbing when one considers that completed suicides represent only a small percentage of the number of attempts; that suicide may be statistically underreported; and that the rates of suicide in many industrialized countries are increasing. Suicide has likewise been found to be the most frequently encountered emergency situation for mental health professionals, with clinicians consistently ranking work with suicidal patients as the most stressful of all clinical endeavors.
Combining the clinical experience and practical recommendations of some of the world's foremost authorities on suicidal and life-threatening behaviors, Suicide: Guidelines for Assessment, Management, and Treatment is designed to fill the current gaps in the training efforts of the mental health and health care disciplines in the area of working with suicidal patients. The chapters are constructed as modules that cover a specific topic in a basic curriculum on suicidology, and include workable practice guidelines that are both essential and up-to-date. Topics include theories of suicide; epidemiology of suicide; biological research; understanding child and youth suicide and suicide among the elderly; procedures for detection of high-risk factors; emergency room care; hospitalization and its alternatives; psychopharmacological treatments; psychological assessment; cognitive and psychodynamic approaches to working with suicidal patients; training and supervision of mental health professionals in the study of suicide; postvention, malpractice and risk management; and forensic issues in suicidology. By bringing together in one landmark volume the cumulative clinical wisdom of many of the pre-eminent experts in suicidology, this book for the first time provides the practitioner and practitioner-in-training with a set of clear and useful guidelines for working with the suicidal patient in clinical practice. As such, it will have broad appeal to psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, marriage and family therapists, and other mental health professionals, as well as to primary care physicians, nurses and other health care professionals.

Bruce Bongar, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the doctoral program in clinical psychology at the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology in Palo Alto, California, and an adjunct associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In addition to his other published work on suicide and life-threatening behaviors, Dr. Bongar is author of The Suicidal Patient: Clinical and Legal Standards of Care. He is a member of the board of directors of the American Association of Suicidology (AAS), the chair of the AAS training committee, and a consulting editor for the AAS journal Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior. Dr. Bongar is a diplomate of the American Board of Professional Psychology, a chartered psychologist of the British Psychological Society, and a fellow of the American Psychological Society and the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine.