Therapeutic and Legal Issues for Therapists Who Have Survived a Client Suicide: Breaking the Silence

The death of a patient is every therapist’s worst nightmare. Even more frightening is the debilitating silence that surrounds a therapist after the death of a client. What do you do? How do you proceed with your personal and professional life? Until now, advice on surviving a patient’s suicide has been scarce.

This book examines this much-overlooked topic to help you continue to live and practice confidently. The authors of this courageous book mix first-person narratives with professional strategies to help therapists deal with the emotional and legal consequences that follow the loss of a client.

Therapeutic and Legal Issues for Therapists Who Have Survived a Client Suicide provides you with:

• models of coping strategies for clinicians after a client completes a suicide
• an examination of factors that compound the trauma for the therapist survivor
• examples for dealing with a client’s family
• suggestions for developing curricula for training institutions
• recommendations for supervisory guidelines
• explanations of—and means of mitigating—legal liability

This practical book describes various ways of dealing with clinician and supervisory responsibilities after a client’s self-inflicted death. It will show you how to minimize the legal risks of working with suicidal clients and help you regain your sense of professional competence if a suicide occurs. New methods of screening and treatment assistance are offered.

With about 30,000 suicides occuring the the United States annually, and many of those people in treatment at or near the time they commit suicide, thousands of clinicians face this trauma yearly. The clear, specific, therapeutic and legal guidelines you’ll find in the book, as well as the philosophical discussions, make it a vital read for therapists, counselors, social workers, nurses, supervisors, and educators in mental health training institutions.