During the course of treating a drug abuse patient, there are many moments to worry incessantly over their wellbeing. None is harder to deal with than surfacing new and unannounced suicidal tendencies. Although it is near impossible to conclusively recognize suicidal tendencies in every patient, there are some warning signs you should be looking for.Of course recognizing suicidal tendencies in a patient is only half the battle, you must also be equipped to treat the patient and prevent future occurrences of any self-destructive thought processes.
Richard Kensinger CSW writes on The Fix about predicting and preventing patient suicide.
Predicting and Preventing Patient Suicide
Addiction therapists have always confronted significant challenges, but providing treatment in the context of the current opioid epidemic has raised the stakes to new levels. Comorbidities that are extremely prevalent in addictions—trauma, physical pain and depression, to name a few—have their own correlations with suicidality. And the increasing percentage of treatment episodes in which opioids are the patient’s drug of choice—and the widespread easy availability of opioids—ups the ante for clinicians and suggests that greater vigilance around potential suicidality is required. We don’t have a good way to determine what percentage of overdose deaths involved an intentional suicidal component. Richard Kensinger is a clinical social worker whose expertise in the realm of patient suicide has been hard-earned, and his piece highlights the “grave responsibility” that clinicians have to evaluate client dangerousness by way of preventing avoidable self-harm…Richard Juman, PsyD. See full post here
At Recovery Coach Training, we provide our coaches with the appropriate training so that they may professionally help patients (and their families) recover from all sorts of issues relating to substance abuse.
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