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AMERICAN PSYCHIATRIC PUBLISHING, INC. Clinical Manual For Assessment And Treatment Of Suicidal Patients by Chiles J A
The cornerstone of any intervention approach with suicidal patients is the recognition and treatment of psychiatric disorders. For many patients, however, treating the mental illness is not enough -- that is, suicidal behavior is not necessarily reduced by treatments that target those illnesses. Something more is needed.
In this provocative and insightful work, Drs. Chiles and Strosahl offer a concrete, practical framework to fill this gap. In doing so, they challenge one of the chief underlying assumptions of traditional approaches to suicide assessment and treatment -- that suicidal behavior can be predicted and controlled. In its place, they propose a new conceptualization of suicidality -- as learned, reinforced problem-solving behaviors that an individual uses when all other options seem to have failed. Rather than focusing on risk prediction and management, interventions in this learning model target the problems that the suicidal behavior is being used to solve. The assumption is that a patient's suicidal behavior represents his or her best attempt at that moment in time to deal with life's difficulties. The clinician's initial task is therefore not to judge or criticize but rather to acknowledge the s.show more