Suicide Prevention Training: Key Knowledge & Skills for Suicide Prevention.
'Key Knowledge & Skills for Suicide Prevention' is a 3-day course from the Association for Psychological Therapies (APT), a leading provider of training for professionals working in mental health and related areas in Canada.
It is the only suicide prevention training that is APT Delegate Accredited and uniquely combines built-in APT Registration with automatic access to our renowned post-course resources to help you support your clients. It is available for teams and individuals, face-to-face or online, and can also count towards the Extended Training in CBT course, or The APT Diploma in Working with common mental health diagnoses.
Executive Summary:
There is more to working with suicidality than risk assessment and management, and having mastered those, we need then to be able to help people to build lives that are much more rewarding. It is unrealistic to think we can create lives that are completely free of suffering, but perfectly realistic to help create lives that are worth suffering for. And this 3-day course strives to achieve just that.
Some professionals become anxious about seeing patients who are suicidal, so what this course aims to do is to help us become relaxed and optimistic about seeing suicidal people, because we will know how to give them hope, and how to deliver as well as possible on that hope.
Who should attend:
All professionals who sometimes work with people who are at risk of suicide, whether in residential facilities, outpatient facilities or in the community.
Note: the age of the people you see is immaterial, it is a fallacy that it is 'mainly young men' who take their own lives. Suicide is one of the top causes of death in young men because other illnesses are less prevalent at that age. Suicide itself however continues through the years.
Equally on gender, although some people make the point that three times as many men than women end their own lives in Canada, it is still the case that 1,136 women do so every year, a substantial figure.
Course aims:
- Above all, the aim of this course is to show how to help a suicidal person to build a life that they can see is genuinely more rewarding. To cover all aspects:
- Behavioural, teaching what activities lead to the feeling that life is more rewarding, and helping the person develop those behaviours.
- Biological, paying attention to factors such as diet, exercise and sleep, factors that help us feel good and also help regulate emotions.
- Environmental, addressing the environment around the person to generate a positive as milieu as possible.
- Social, helping develop positive relationships and minimize destructive ones.
- Thinking style, so the person can see that their life is now more rewarding and develop tolerance for the distress that is part and parcel of most people’s experience.
- All so that the person is left with a robust and rewarding life that can withstand substantial ‘knocks’ and still remain solid.
- Along the way, the course aims to highlight how there can be no better way to spend our professional time than to help people who are so distressed that they are thinking of ending their lives - to change the perception of suicide as something that is worrisome to something that is a clear opportunity to make a great impact.
- To provide a simple non-intrusive measure of progress while at the same time monitoring risk.
The course covers:
- The nature of suicide: reckless suicide, 'out of the blue' suicide, 'I don't think he meant it' suicide, and others.
- The first treatment session: why it is so important: the relationship and assessment.
- Continuing risk management: How to keep the person safe while you give proper treatment to provide a long term solution. The weakness of a formal contract and the effectiveness of an informal contract.
- Case formulation: making sense of the information you have, and continuing to do so. Understanding why the person is suicidal.
- Key personality factors for the therapist: Persistence, Optimism and more. What to do if you only sometimes possess these factors.
- How to give hope for the future: the key ingredient that makes the difference between giving believable hope and unbelievable hope.
- What makes life more rewarding? What research tells us are the five prevailing factors that lead to happiness.
- Idiosyncratic factors: not everyone fits in with the blanket factors that research tells us about. How to seek out the factors specific to your patient, and to work with them in a proper, evidence-based way.
- The 'damaged' individual – the person who feels that, because of what has happened to them, there can never be any hope for their future.
- The patient who says “There's just nothing to live for” and yet won't work towards improving their life.
- The reckless suicide: the person who killed themselves yet professionals say “he didn't really mean to do it”.
- Dealing with Loss, 1: the case of the banker who ended his life because he was down to his last £5million. Universal principles.
- Dealing with Loss, 2: the case of the man who is suicidal 15 years after his wife left him. Universal principles.
- What to do about recurring thoughts of shame, guilt and embarrassment.
- Difficult cases: where you can see that maybe it makes sense to consider suicide.
- “He surely didn't kill himself because he'd run out of toothpaste?” What to do about 'the last straw phenomenon'.
- Avoiding the potholes, 1: working with people who are just too lethargic to end their lives – until your intervention increases their energy levels.
- Avoiding the potholes, 2: the patient who is suddenly much more cheerful – because they've made up their mind to 'end their misery'.
- Beyond 'no longer a suicide risk' – making life more rewarding, and ensuring it stays that way.
- Working with suicide is exciting, fascinating, and immensely rewarding, yet it can also be stressful. How to manage that stress, especially in case of 'significant incidents'.
What this course will do for you:
- You will see that there can be no better way to spend your professional time than to help people who are so distressed that they are thinking of ending their lives. You will see a clear opportunity to make a great impact.
- You will be able to use the PMSRS structured interview to quickly obtain information across a range of important factors – and have guidelines about how to respond usefully.
- You will be able to measure progress in a simple, non-intrusive way, while at the same time monitoring risk. You will feel the reassurance given by this.
- You will be able to spot 'false dawns' and know how to avoid the dangers they pose.
- You will be able to handle the stresses - and enjoy the rewards – of working with suicide.
- Above all, you will be able to help suicidal people to build a life that they can see is genuinely more rewarding. You will be able to cover all aspects – behavioural, biological, environmental, social and cognitive – so that the person is left with a robust and rewarding life that can withstand substantial 'knocks' and still remain solid.
What you receive as a result of attending the training:
You will be registered as having attended the course, thereby gaining APT Registration Level 1, and receive a certificate to this effect. The registration gives you access to online resources associated with the course and access to the online exam if you wish to uprate your APT Registration to Level 2 (note, the exam is inbuilt into the 'online anytime' version of the course).
Your record of attendance lasts indefinitely, whilst your APT Registration Level lasts for 3 years from the date of completion and is renewable.
Your registration is given value by the fact of over 150,000 people having attended APT training. See APT Registration for full details.
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Quick Links
Suicide-Risk Assessment and Management ❯
Key Knowledge & Skills for Suicide Prevention ❯
Live Feedback Ratings.
Every delegate rates our courses for presentation and relevance and the averages below update automatically as each new course runs.
These live results also power APT’s acclaimed Accreditation System — so widely valued because it is evidence-based, drawing directly on the real-time ratings of professionals who have completed the training.
Face-to-Face*
Presentation:
Relevance:
Online Live*
Presentation:
Relevance:
Online Anytime**
Overall Rating:
* Feedback taken from the last 10 runnings of this course (each course has around 15 people attending).
** Feedback taken from the last 20 people completing the course. Delegates give a single overall rating to anytime courses.
If the course has run less than the stated number of times, the percentage score will be based on the number of times the course has been completed.
Reviews.
APT prides itself on the feedback we receive about our courses. Below are just some of the great comments our suicide prevention courses have received.
"I have found this course one of the most interesting, thought provoking and inspiring courses I have been on and will definitely take my new knowledge forward in my practice."
"At my level, communication and interpersonal skills training in such a topic is an excellent opportunity to help develop my skills to motivate and train my team. I am sure this course will be beneficial to our unit and the client group."
