Losing a client to suicide represents a dreaded outcome of mental health care. In response to this loss, clinicians may have a range of experiences that occur while fulfilling professional roles and responsibilities. This session will provide an overview of responses to losing a client to suicide and suggestions for coping and integrating the loss. By learning about this topic, we can support personal and professional growth for ourselves and colleagues.

Learning Objectives  
By the conclusion of this event, participants will be able to:

1. Recognize implicit beliefs about suicide that influence responses to suicide loss. 
2. Identify four “narratives of violent dying” that characterize how suicide loss is interpreted.  
3. Prepare a plan for administrative tasks after the suicide of a client. 
4. Recognize aspects of personal and professional growth as suicide loss becomes integrated.   

Instructor | Dr. Jeffrey Sung is a board-certified psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor in the University of Washington Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.  He has developed and delivered trainings on suicide prevention, suicide care, and responding to patient suicide locally and nationally for a broad range of audiences.  His work with the Safer Homes program through Forefront Suicide Prevention at the UW School of Social Work has focused on cultural aspects of firearms ownership and use and how these influence policy and clinical care.  For seventeen years, he provided psychiatric care in downtown Seattle through a Health Care for the Homeless Network grant.  He currently maintains a private practice for patient care, training, forensic and clinical consultation.   

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Suicide remains a leading cause of death both in the United States and globally (https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/suicide). Despite the significance of suicide as a public health issue, funding for suicide prevention and research remains low (https://report.nih.gov/funding/categorical-spending#/), comprehensive training in the area of suicide in graduate programs remains low (https://guilfordjournals.com/doi/abs/10.1521/suli.33.2.211.22769) as does general provider competency with treatment of suicidal individuals (https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2008-10899-004). One possible linkage between these phenomena is the presence of stigma related to suicide and the treatment of suicidal individuals. In order to create lasting systemic change to address suicide as a public health issue the concept of stigma must be addressed in a meaningful and effective manner. The current presentation outlines what we currently know about the impact of stigma and suicide, individual level and system interventions which may lower stigma, and outlines potential future directions for suicide stigma work bridging the dialectic between stigmatizing suicide and inadvertently increasing the probability of suicide.

Learning Objectives  
By the conclusion of this event, participants will be able to:

1. Participants will be able to identify individual and group characteristics associated with having more stigmatizing views of suicide
2. Participants will be able to describe the potentially negative impact of stigma on mental health outcomes with regards to suicide
3. Participants will be able to describe the potential for increases in suicide risk when normalizing suicide
4. Participants will be able to identify multiple behaviorally specific strategies for reducing stigma related to suicide in their communities
5. Participants will be able to identify multiple behaviorally specific strategies for increasing effective treatment of suicide in their communities
6.  

Instructor | Dr. White received his doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Rhode Island and was a fellow at Harvard Medical School before moving to Oregon, where he is a licensed psychologist. His clinical areas of expertise include suicide, clinical risk management, adolescent and family treatment, dialectical behavior therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, behavioral therapy, and implementation of evidence-based practice. He has extensive research and evaluation experience on both coasts, with specific interests in community-based program evaluation, multilevel modeling, frequent use of psychiatric emergency services, and general evaluation of evidence-based practice. As an advocate of the scientist/practitioner model, he has a strongly held value and passion for the adherent delivery of effective evidence-based treatment, especially for individuals who have experienced barriers to accessing mental health services.

In addition to clinical services, Dr. White trains internationally on suicide prevention and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and specializes in the implementation of DBT with non-dominant and native populations. He is a Clinical Assistant Professor within the Department of Psychiatry, Clinical Psychology within the School of Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University, is board certified in DBT through the Linehan Board of Certification, holds ABPP Board Certification in Clinical and Behavioral Psychology, volunteers as a journal reviewer, and volunteers in multiple capacities for the Linehan Board of Certification.

He is co-owner of the Portland DBT Institute (PDBTI) and serves as the Associate Director.  At PDBTI he works with the management team to set program policy, provides clinical services to adults, adolescents, and families, oversees research and evaluation services, and provides supervision to psychologist residents and clinical staff.

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Referrals of parents asking for help with struggling young adult children have grown exponentially in recent years. These young adult children are often under/unemployed, not actively pursuing education/training options, struggle with emotion dysregulation and behavioral activation, experience urges for high-risk behaviors including suicide and non-suicidal self-injury and are reliant solely on parents’ financial and emotional support. Frustrated parents describe feeling unable to effectively encourage change in their young-adult child. Also, parents often inadvertently reinforce the problem behaviors causing distress, which accommodates ineffective behaviors in adult children. While the DBT model has already proven effective in instructing and supporting parents, a method for intervening in parental accommodation was needed. The SPACE protocol (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions), developed as a parent only intervention for treating childhood anxiety, has an adaptation for parents of failure to launch young adults (Lebowitz, 2016). This Learn and Earn will present the rationale for combining DBT and SPACE, define specific ways parents accommodate young adult children, and demonstrate how DBT skills can effectively guide parents to reduce accommodation at home while fostering effective relationships with their adult children.  

A half-day training on this topic will also be offered on December 13, 2024!

More Information on Half-Day Training

Learning Objectives  
By the conclusion of this event, participants will be able to:

1. Explain the rationale for using SPACE and DBT with parents of multi-diagnostic young adults.  
2. Define Accommodation as applied to parents of young adults, and list six reasons parents commonly engage in Accommodating behaviors.  
3. Explain how DBT skills behaviorally support parents in reducing accommodation and increase capabilities in adult children.   

Instructor | Amy Kalasunas, LPCC-S, NCC, DBT-LBC, is a behaviorist with over 20 years of experience working within evidence-based treatment models. She has extensive training in DBT and its sub-specialty area of DBT-Prolonged Exposure (PE), as well as supervision and consultation team adherence practices.

Kalasunas is one of the few therapists in Ohio who is a DBT-LBC Certified Clinician through the DBT-Linehan Board of Certification, an independently certified board that identifies providers and programs that reliably offer DBT in a way that conforms to evidence-based research. She is co-chair of the DBT-LBC Publications Committee, and serves on the DBT LBC Communications Committee. A sought-after presenter, Kalasunas consistently achieves the highest evaluation scores when presenting two- and three-day workshops on the topics of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, DBT and Complex Eating Disorders, and DBT-Prolonged Exposure and Eating Disorders.

Her clinical work has included developing, implementing, and evaluating program outcomes across the spectrum of clinical milieus, including inpatient psychiatric hospitals, Partial Hospitalization Programs, Intensive Outpatient Programs, community mental health agencies, specialty practice clinics, and private practice offices. Her current clinical practice includes providing comprehensive DBT to adults as well as treating symptoms of PTSD with DBT-PE. She also as provides evidence-based interventions to parents of adolescents and young adults who struggle to meet expected milestones.

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