Category Archives: Writing

Counseling and Psychotherapy Theory and Practice, Personal Reflections, Writing

My Birthday Wish (and Request)

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Yesterday, in anticipation of my 63rd trip around the sun, I started feeling a slow creep of melancholia. At my age, because all movements are slower than frozen molasses, I now have the luxury of spotting doom early on, as its ambling my way. Last night’s gloominess was mostly about aging, but amplified by my nightly dose of watching the evening news. As usual, the news inevitably featured Donald J. Trump being Donald J. Trump, and saying things that can’t—without the aid of a delusional disorder—be framed as anything other than mean, nasty, and dangerous. After yet again witnessing Mr. Trump’s malevolence, I turned to Rita and murmured, “I think he might be evil.”

As soon as the word evil escaped my mouth, I immediately thought of Carl Rogers. Rogers was an amazing American psychologist who, from the 1930s to the 1960s, developed a profoundly empathic way of working with people. Rogers was raised in a rigid fundamental conservative Christian family. He wasn’t allowed to dance or play cards. During college, at age 20 (the year was 1922), Rogers took a sharp ideological left turn while on a slow boat to China. He stepped away from his fundamentalist roots, and began embracing a broad and encompassing belief in the goodness of all people. Rogers stepped so far away from judgmentalism, and believed so deeply and persistently in the innate goodness of all humans, that many philosophers and psychologists in the 1950s and 1960s (like Rollo May and Martin Buber), viewed Rogers as dangerously naïve.

After realizing back in the 20th century that I would never be “Like Mike” (Michael Jordan), I started fancying myself as being like Carl Rogers instead. The match seemed perfect. Just like Rogers, I believe in everyone’s positive potential. Also like Rogers, I don’t really believe in evil. However, after four years of listening to someone with immense power mock the disabled, disparage the military, demean women, remorselessly lock migrant children in cages, stoke hate, division, and conspiracies, and threaten to blow up our democratic process . . . I’ve begun reconsidering my naïve Rogerian perspective on evil. Last night’s news snippet included Mr. Trump’s continued attack on the Michigan governor. As far as I can tell, the only times Mr. Trump manages to use his words to show empathy is when he’s reading—rather haltingly—off of a teleprompter.

Rogers might blanch at my judgment of Trump, but I think not. He wrote a book “On Personal Power” and his bottom line was that you should give it away. And when I interviewed his daughter, Natalie Rogers, in 2006, she made it clear that her dad was in favor of accepting and prizing all human feelings, but that he could be quite firm when people (and his children) behaved in unacceptable ways. I’m pretty sure that Carl Rogers, one of the most profoundly influential psychologists of all time, would be horrified by Mr. Trump’s behavior, and he would use his power to bring back civility, decency, and empathy.

A couple years ago I had the honor of meeting Joe Biden, face-to-face. He greeted me with flourish and enthusiasm. He oozed empathy, compassion, kindness, and a commitment to service. He spoke and acted without a whiff of arrogance. I’m convinced that he’s the sort of person who will use his power for good.

Here’s my birthday wish (and request). Instead of sending me all the lavish gifts you had planned to send me, just go out and spread the word that decency, empathy, respect, kindness, and love are making a HUGE comeback. And if you know someone whom you think isn’t voting, consider this: reach out with respect and kindness and ask them to vote for Joe Biden. That would be amazing . . . a little frosting on my birthday wish.

Thanks for reading this and for helping make my birthday wish come true.

Counseling and Psychotherapy Theory and Practice, Writing

Essential Information about Counseling and Psychotherapy Theories

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A good summary is a beautiful thing. But summaries are always unfair and limited representations of that which is bigger. Nevertheless, below, I’ve tried to summarize the primary listening focus and the primary change mechanisms for each of 13 theoretical orientations included in our textbook, Counseling and Psychotherapy Theories in Context and Practice (John Wiley & Sons, 2018). In addition, yesterday I filmed myself using a memory-palace strategy while describing all 13 perspectives below. You can read the summary below and/or watch me try to pull off this 15 minute theories overview on YouTube: https://youtu.be/VJFK6cCHCU8

TheoryWhat to Listen For. . .Change Mechanisms
Psychoanalytic PsychodynamicOld maladaptive intrapersonal conflicts and repetitive, unconscious, and dysfunctional interpersonal patterns.Make unconscious conscious, catharsis, and working through new intra- and interpersonal dynamics.
AdlerianBasic mistakes imbedded in the style of life, including excess self-interest and inferiority/superiority.Awareness, insight, and encouragement (courage) to face the tasks of life.
ExistentialAnxiety over and avoidance of core existential life dynamics like death, isolation, meaninglessness, and freedom.Feedback and confrontation to help clients gain awareness and face life’s ultimate existential demands.
Person-CenteredEmotional distress, incongruence (discrepancies between real and ideal selves), and conditions of worth.A relationship characterized by congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding.
GestaltUnfinished emotional and behavioral baggage from the past that blocks awareness or disturbs self-other boundaries.Guidance on using here-and-now experiments to deal with unfinished emotional and behavioral experiences.
BehavioralDisturbing emotions (e.g., anxiety), maladaptive behavior patterns, and environmental contingencies.New learning or re-learning via operant, classical, and social processes.
CBTDisturbing emotions (e.g., anxiety, anger), maladaptive thinking, maladaptive behaviors, and triggers/contingenciesCollaborative and empirical tasks that modify maladaptive or distorted cognitive information processing.
Choice Theory/Reality TherapyWhat clients want, what they’re doing, whether that’s working, and planning.Commit to and enact adaptive plans that are aligned with quality world goals.
FeministWhere is the client experiencing anger or dissatisfaction due to gender-based limits or oppressive situations?Relational connection and empowerment to actively seek personal goals and mutually empathic emotional relationships.
ConstructiveWhere clients are stuck and how existing client strengths, exceptions, and solutions can fuel change.Re-shaping, reframing, and reconsolidating old narratives and problem-based patterns through solutions and sparkling moments.
Family SystemsFamily dynamics, transactions, hierarchy, roles, and boundaries that contribute to personal or systemic dysfunction.Shift family dynamics and transactions via in-session and outside session assignments.
MulticulturalWhere is the client experiencing distress due to limiting or oppressive socio-political factors?Cultural acceptance, empowerment, and culturally-based rituals.
IntegrativeWhat are the client’s unique problems, strengths, and consistent ways of thinking, acting, and feeling?Match a therapeutic process to the client’s unique problems and strengths.
Clinical Interviewing, Writing

Guidelines for Giving and Receiving Feedback

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Feedback 2

Giving and receiving feedback is a huge topic. In this blog post the focus is on giving and receiving feedback in classroom settings or in counseling/psychotherapy supervision. The following guidelines are far from perfect, but they offer ideas that instructors and students can use to structure the feedback giving and receiving process. Check them out, and feel free to improve on what’s here.

Before you do anything, remember that feedback can feel threatening. Hearing about how we sound and what we look like is pretty much a trigger for self-consciousness and vulnerability. Sometimes, when we look in the mirror, we don’t like what we see, and so obviously, when someone else holds up a mirror, the feedback we experience may be . . . uncomfortable. . . to say the least. To help everyone feel a bit safer, the following can be helpful:

  • Acknowledge that feedback is scary.
  • Emphasize that feedback is essential to counseling skill development.
  • Share the feedback process you’ll be using
  • Make recommendations and give examples of what kind of feedback is most useful.

Acknowledge that Feedback is Scary: You can talk about mirrors (see above), or about how unpleasant it is for most people to hear their own voices or see their own images, or tell a story of difficult and helpful feedback. I encourage you to find your own way to acknowledge that feedback triggers vulnerability.

Feedback is Essential: Encourage students to lean into their vulnerability and be open to feedback—but don’t pressure them. Explain: “The reason you’re in a counseling class is to improve your skills. Though hard to hear, constructive feedback is useful for skill development. Don’t think of it as criticism, but as an opportunity to learn from mistakes and improve your counseling skills.” What’s important is to norm the value of giving and getting feedback.

Share the Process You’ll be Using: Before starting a role play or in-class practice scenario, describe the guidelines you’ll be using for giving and receiving feedback (and then generate additional rules from students in the class). Here are some guidelines I’ve used:

  • Everyone who volunteers (or does a demonstration or is being observed) gets appreciation. Saying, “Thanks for volunteering” is essential. I like it when my classes establish a norm where whoever does the role-playing or volunteers gets a round of applause.
  • After being appreciated, the role-player starts the process with a self-evaluation. You might say something like, “After every role play or presentation, the first thing we’ll do is have the person or people who were role-playing share their own thoughts about what they did well and what they think they didn’t do so well.”
  • After the volunteer self-evaluates, they’re asked whether they’d like feedback from others. If they say no, then no feedback should be given. Occasionally students will feel so vulnerable about a performance that they don’t want feedback. We need to accept their preference for no feedback and also encourage them to solicit and accept feedback at some later point in time.

Giving Useful Feedback: It’s always good to start with the positive. Try to be very clear and specific about some things you especially liked. I usually take notes to help me with this; I’ll write down exactly what the role player said and put a + sign next to it so I can say something like, “I see in my notes that I put a + sign next to your very first paraphrase. You seemed to be tracking very well and you shared what you heard with your client in a way that felt nice.

Constructive or corrective feedback shouldn’t focus so much on what was done poorly, but emphasize what could be done to perform the skill even better. Constructive or corrective feedback might sound like this: “I noticed you asked several closed questions. Closed questions aren’t bad questions, but sometimes it’s easier to keep clients talking about important content if you replace your closed questions with open questions or with a paraphrase. Let’s try that. How could you change one of your closed questions to an open question or a paraphrase?” BTW: General and positive comments (e.g., “Good job!”) are pleasant and encouraging, but should be used in combination with more specific feedback; it’s important to know what was good about your job.

Constructive feedback should be specific, concrete, and focused on things that can be modified. For example, you can offer a positive or non-facilitative behavioral observation (e.g., “I noticed you leaned back and crossed your arms when the client started talking about sexuality.”). After making an observation, the feedback giver or the group can explore potential hypotheses (e.g., “Your client might interpret you leaning back and crossing your arms as judgmental”). The feedback giver can also offer an alternative (“Instead, you might want to lean forward and focus on some of your excellent nonverbal listening skills.”).

With constructive feedback you can take some of the evaluation out of the comment by just noticing or observing, rather than judging, “I noticed you said the word, ‘Gotcha’ several times.” You can also ask what else they might say instead, “To vary how you’re responding to your client, what might you say instead of ‘Gotcha’?”

General negative comments such as “That was poorly done.” should be avoided. To be constructive, provide feedback that’s specific, concrete, and holds out the potential for positive change. Feedback should never be uniformly negative. Everyone engages in counseling behaviors that are more or less facilitative. If you happen to be the type who easily sees what’s wrong and have trouble offering praise, impose the following rule on yourself: If you can’t offer positive feedback, don’t offer any at all. Another alternative is to consciously focus on using the sandwich feedback technique when appropriate (i.e., say something positive, say something constructive, then say another positive thing).

IMHO, significant constructive feedback is the responsibility of the instructor and should be given during a private, individual supervision session. The general rule: “Give positive feedback in public and constructive feedback in private” can be useful.

Finally, students should be reminded of the disappointing fact that no one performs perfectly, including the teacher or professor. Also, when you do demonstrations, be sure to model the process by doing a self-evaluation (including things you might have done better), and then asking students for observations and feedback.

 

 

Clinical Interviewing, Personal Reflections, Suicide Assessment and Intervention, Writing

Suicide Education Resources . . . and Why is it so Easy to Experience Imposter Syndrome?

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Personal Reflections, Politics, Writing

100 Days: What Happens Next?

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Elephants

For many, watching a sweaty Donald Trump give himself high praise for being able to pass a cognitive test that awards points for accurately identifying a picture of an elephant is oddly reassuring. Liberals, #NeverTrumpers, and other hopeful humans have had difficulty covering their glee. Mocking Trump’s person-woman-man-camera-TV buffoonery and how it illustrates his diminished or diminishing mental capacity is gratifying.

Speaking of buffoonery—because it’s more pleasant than what I’ll speak of next—a former student of mine sent me his proposal for a new cognitive test. He calls it the Idaho Cognitive Assessment (IdCA). Here’s what he wrote:

Listen, I’ve been making up five item memory tests for myself lately, and I ace them every time. For example, I’ll list off the names of my three kids, Monica, and our dog, and when I try to remember them a minute later, it’s easy for me. It’s not easy for everyone, but it’s easy for me. I even give myself extra points if I get them in order.

The IdCA is a fabulous and perfect parallel to the Donald Trump Cognitive Assessment (DtCA).  Using his clever spontaneity, Trump made up the DtCA on the spot while being filmed by a person, a woman, a man, a camera, and a TV. Just for the record, although the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) isn’t especially difficult, it’s harder than the IdCA and the DtCA. But because Trump lies about everything we still don’t really know if could identify an elephant, remember five items, or pass the MoCA.

What I wish (and, I suspect, many others) is that Donald Trump was only a sweaty buffoon making a comedic cameo on Fox News. But, sadly, he’s more than a sweaty buffoon; he’s a dangerous sweaty buffoon, serial liar, and incompetent leader who’s putting the future of the United States and planet Earth at risk. What I fear is that while gloating over his buffoonery, we’ll forget that Trump is also an evil genius.

Trump is a once-in-a-century antisocial demagogue. If you don’t know what that means, check out my Slate article or this blog post: https://johnsommersflanagan.com/2018/11/05/my-closing-argument-take-a-breath-check-your-moral-compass-and-vote-for-checks-and-balances-in-government/.

Trump has a particularly unsavory personality type. Documentation of this personality type goes back to Aristotle’s student, Theophrastus (371 – 287 B.C.), who wrote:

The Unscrupulous Man will go and borrow more money from a creditor he has never paid . . . . When marketing he reminds the butcher of some service he has rendered him and, standing near the scales, throws in some meat, if he can, and a soup-bone. If he succeeds, so much the better; if not, he will snatch a piece of tripe and go off laughing (from Widiger, Corbitt, & Millon, p. 63).

About 2000 years later, the famous American physician, Benjamin Rush, picked up on Theophrastus’s theme, becoming intrigued with what was briefly called moral insanity. In cases of moral insanity, individuals are capable of clear and lucid thought, but repeatedly engage in irresponsible, immoral, and destructive behaviors without experiencing guilt or shameless. These shameless criminals act boldly, but without moral compass, believing that only they could possibly divine the true and correct way forward. In an apt description of Trump’s everyday behavior, Rush wrote: “Persons thus diseased cannot speak the truth upon any subject” (1812, p. 124).

Although predicting the future is always inexact, Trump’s personality type provides a reasonable foundation. That being the case, my personality-based predictions for Trump’s future behaviors are below—along with ways in which we, as U.S. citizens interested in the continuation of a democratic republic—can respond.

  1. Trump will tell more and bigger lies. As threats to his presidency and risks of defeat loom, Trump’s lies will grow in size and frequency. The good news is that Trump’s lies will grow more obvious, and hopefully the American public and media can leverage them to further grow opposition.
  2. Trump will continue to show poor judgment, principally because he’s the only one who living in his personal decision-making echo chamber. Trump’s logic and gut are impaired. His decisions will continue to often be wrong and dangerous. The good news about Trump’s poor judgment is that if the media can pounce on his upcoming egregiously bad decisions, the public may continue to grow in their distrust of him.
  3. Trump will deflect responsibility. Trump’s moral philosophy includes complete opposition to taking responsibility for mistakes. This pattern will continue. As in the past, he’ll blame others (e.g., Obama, Biden, Clinton) for things they’ve never done. In many cases, his deflecting responsibility will include abject projection (Crooked Hillary was clearly a projection by Crooked Donald). Trump’s tendency to project his own criminal behavior onto others can provide leads to what he’s doing. Also, and this is critical, EVERYTHING Trump does needs to be framed as the responsibility of every individual member of the GOP, until and unless they split from him.
  4. To compensate for his slagging physical and intellectual abilities, Trump will become increasingly desperate to look strong. The bad news is that Trump posturing may translate into more tear gas, more fomenting of foreign conflict, and more steps toward martial law. The good news is that he cannot stop himself from looking and acting pathetic . . . and as organizations like the Lincoln Project target Trump’s weakness and pathetic efforts to appear competent, they’re proving their exceptional media savvy.
  5. Trump will stoke division and inflame hatred. This is a common Trumpian strategy. The good news is that many Americans are aware of this strategy and can compensate with unification. The other good news is that if polls continue downward, Trump won’t be able to resist stoking division within his own ranks.
  6. Trump will continue to seek profit and praise to assuage his battered ego. Again, the more desperate his follows this path, the more likely he is to make mistakes, and the more opportunities there are to catch him, red-handed, in criminal activity.
  7. Trump will continue in his role as influence-peddler in chief. Trump will use money, power, legal intimidation, and any leverage he can find to recruit and embolden followers. The details of how he accomplishes this and the psychological vulnerability of ForeverTrumpers is grist for another mill, but count on it to continue, and count on it to continue to seem completely irrational.

I know there’s nothing much new here. But the point is that now and into the future we need to maintain a planned and proactive attack on Trump’s competence, with unwavering focus on catching him and holding him accountable for the many lies, mistakes, and criminal activities he will be engaging in for the next 100 days. We know Trump is an immensely narcissistic compulsive liar who lacks basic self-awareness and seems unable to muster up empathy or compassion for anyone other than his loyal, criminal, and sycophantic followers—even when those followers happen to have deep links to pedophilia or the Russian mob. However, we also know that these traits were in place four years ago, and he was elected anyway. That’s why, right now, as we enter the home-stretch, we all need to be focused like a laser on deconstructing his genius while simultaneously, exposing his weaknesses, his criminal activities, and every manifestation of his pathetic buffoonery . . . as he makes his way down the slippery metaphoric ramp toward November 3, 2020.

Trump on Ramp

Counseling and Psychotherapy Theory and Practice, Happiness, Personal Reflections, Politics, Writing

To Mask or Not to Mask: Making America Rational Again

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Make America Rational Again

About 4 years ago, I made a MARA hat. MARA stands for “Make America Rational Again.” My hat was in honor of the late Albert Ellis, a famous psychologist who relentlessly advocated for rational thinking. Given that some folks are doubting Covid-19, while others are passionately accusing health officials of infringing on their God-given liberties, I’m thinking my MARA hat from the last presidential election is still in style.

Way back when I was a full-time therapist working mostly with teenagers, I developed a method for talking with my teen-clients about their freedoms. When they complained about their parents infringing on their rights—those damn parents were pronouncing unreasonable curfews, alcohol prohibitions, and other silly mandates—I’d say something like this:

“Really, you only have three choices. You can do whatever your parents think you should do. That’s option #1. Or, you can do the opposite of what your parents think you should do. That’s option #2. Those are easy options. You don’t even have to think.”

Hoping to pique the teen’s interest, I’d pause and to let my profound comments linger. Sometimes I got stony silence, or an eye-roll. But usually curiosity won out, and my client would ask:

“What’s the third choice?”

“The third choice is for you to make an independent decision. But that’s way harder. You probably don’t want to go there.”

Actually, most of my teenage clients DID want to go there. They wanted to learn, grow, develop, and become capable of effective decision-making. Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the case today. All too often, Americans are basing their decision-making on poor information. For example, when people are gathering the 411 on whether they should mask-up in public settings, to where do they turn? The rational choice would be medical professionals and virologists. But instead, people are turning to Facebook, Twitter, and even worse, Fox News, where misinformation from Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity is offered up with nary a shred of journalistic ethics or integrity (for a fun and fabulous SNL Parody with Kate McKinnon as Laura Ingraham, check out this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XezLiezWN0E).

A related question that’s especially pressing right now is this: “How should we respond to coronavirus deniers and rabid anti-maskers?” Speaking for myself, I’ve been struggling to find the right words. Saying what I’m thinking—which usually starts with “WTF!? Have you been listening to Tucker Carlson instead of Dr. Fauci?”—seems too offensive and unhelpful. Instead, I’m making a commitment to letting go of the outrage, putting my 2016 campaign hat back on, and making myself rational again. Instead of being angry, my plan is to retreat to rationality. I’ll say things like this: “Hey, I’m curious, have you read the latest article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled, “Observational study of hydroxychloroquine in hospitalized patients with Covid-19?” or, “What are your thoughts about the chilblain-like lesions doctors are finding on patients with Covid-19?” or “According to the CDC and Dr. Fauci and the American Medical Association, the cloth face coverings—although imperfect—statistically reduce the likelihood of spreading the coronavirus.”

I invite you to join me in gathering good data for our personal and social decision-making. Together, we can Make America Rational Again.

Counseling and Psychotherapy Theory and Practice, Suicide Assessment and Intervention, Writing

Individualizing Suicide Risk Factors in the Context of a Clinical Interview

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Spring 2020

In response to my recent post on “The Myth of Suicide Risk and Protective Factors” Mark, a clinical supervisor from Edmonton, wrote me and asked about how to make individualizing suicide risk factors with clients more concrete/practical and less abstract. I thought, “What a great question” and will try to answer it here.

Let’s start with two foundational prerequisites. First, clinical providers need to be able to ask about suicide in ways that don’t pathologize the patient/client. Specifically, if clients fear that disclosing suicide ideation will result in them being judged as “crazy” or in involuntary hospitalization, then they’re more likely to keep their suicidal thoughts to themselves. This fear dynamic is one reason why we emphasize using a normalizing frame when asking about suicide.

Second, both before and after suicide ideation disclosures, providers need to explicitly emphasize collaboration. Essentially, the message is: “All we’re doing is working together to better understand and address the distress or pain that underlies your suicidal thoughts.” In other words, the focus isn’t on getting rid of suicidal thoughts; the focus is on reduction of psychological pain or distress.

With these two foundational principles in place, then the provider can collaboratively explore the primary and secondary sources of the client’s psychological pain. In our seven-dimensional model, we recommend exploring emotional, cognitive, interpersonal, physical, cultural-spiritual, behavioral, and contextual sources of pain. Collaborative exploration is fundamental to individualizing risk factors. The general statistics showing that previous attempts, social isolation, physical illness, being male, and other factors predict suicide are mostly useless at that point. Instead, your job as a mental health provider is to pursue the distress. By pursuing the distress, you discover individualized risk factors. The following excerpt from our upcoming book illustrates how asking about “What’s bad” and “What feels worst?” results in individualized risk factors.

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     The opening exchange with Sophia is important because it shows how clinicians—even when operating from a strength-based foundation—address emotional distress. In the beginning the counselor drills down into the negative (e.g., “What’s making you feel bad?”), even though the plan is to develop client strengths and resilience. By drilling down into the client’s distress and emotional pain, and then later identifying what helps the client cope, the counselor is individualizing risk and protective factor assessment, rather than using a ubiquitous checklist.

Counselor: Sophia, thanks for meeting. I know you’re not super-excited to be here. I also know your parents said you’ve been talking about suicide off and on for a while, so they wanted me to talk with you. But I don’t know exactly what’s happening in your life. I don’t know how you’re feeling. And I would like to be of help. And so if you’re willing to talk to me, the first thing I’d love to hear would be what’s going on in your life, and what’s making you feel bad or sad or miserable or whatever it is you’re feeling?

The counselor began with an acknowledgement and quick summary of what he knew. This is a basic strategy for working with teens (Sommers-Flanagan & Sommers-Flanagan, 2007), but also can be true when working with adults. If counselors withhold what they know about clients, rapport and relationship development suffers.

The opening phrase “I don’t know. . .” acknowledges the limits of the counselor’s knowledge and offers an invitation for collaboration. Effective clinicians initially and intermittently offer invitations for collaboration to build the working alliance (Parrow, Sommers-Flanagan, Sky Cova, & Lungu, 2019). The underlying message is, “I want to help, but I can’t be helpful all on my own. I need your input so we can work together to address the distress you’re feeling.”

The opening question for Sophia is negative (i.e., What’s making you feel bad or sad or miserable or whatever it is you’re feeling?). This opening shows empathy for the emotional distress that triggers her suicidality and clarifies the link between her emotional distress and the triggering situations. By tuning into negative emotions, the counselor hones in on the presumptive primary treatment goal for all clients who are suicidal—to reduce the perceived intolerable or excruciating emotional distress (Shneidman, 1993).

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Collaborative exploration is the method through which risk and protective factors are individualized. If Sophia had a previous attempt, the reason to explore the previous attempt would be to discover what created the emotional distress that provoked the attempt, and how counseling or psychotherapy might address that particular factor. For example, if bullying and lack of social connection triggered Sophia’s attempt, then we would view bullying and social disconnection as Sophia’s particular individualized risk factors. We would then build treatments—in collaboration with Sophia and her family—that directly address the unique factors contributing to her pain, and provide her with palpable therapeutic support.

I hope this post has clarified how to individualize suicide risk factors and use them in treatment. Thanks for the question Mark!

Parenting, Personal Reflections, Politics, Writing

A Glorious Moment

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Pumpkins at birth

One nice thing about having my own blog is I get to post whatever I want. Sometimes that means I suffer from my own bad judgment. But not today.

Today, I’m posting a link to a fresh, new article in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. The article is titled, “Our False Promise of Justice.” Not only is this article timely and compelling; not only is it well-reasoned and compassionate; not only is it balanced and beautiful prose; it’s also written by Rylee Sommers-Flanagan, my youngest daughter, who happens to be an attorney, a graduate of Stanford Law School, and a pretty fantastic person. Okay, so now I’m just bragging.

Despite my bragging, the preceding information is all true. At least IMHO.

If you read it and like it, please do me the favor of sharing this article with your friends and on social media.

Here’s the link: https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/our-false-promise-of-justice/

 

Clinical Interviewing, Suicide Assessment and Intervention, Writing

The Myth of Suicide Risk and Protective Factors

6 Comments

 

HummingbirdMyths are fascinating, resilient ideas that openly defy reality.

Some people say, “All myths are based in truth.” Well, maybe so, but tracking down the myth’s truthful origins reminds me of my friends back in high school who used to take their dates snipe hunting. Maybe the idea that all myths are based in truth is a myth too?

Suicide is a troubling problem (this is an obvious understatement). To deal with this troubling problem, one of the tools that most well-intended prevention programs advocate is to watch for suicide risk factors and warning signs, and when you see them, intervene. This would be great guidance if only useful or accurate suicide risk factors and warning signs existed. Sadly, like the snipe, you can look all night for useful or accurate risk factors and still come up empty.

I’m writing about mythical risk factors and warning signs today because I just covered this content in our suicide assessment and treatment manuscript. In the following excerpt, we’re writing about suicide competencies for mental health professionals:

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Cramer and colleagues (2013) noted, “One of the clinician’s primary objectives in conducting a suicide risk assessment is to elicit risk and protective factors from the client” (p. 6). As we’ll discuss in greater detail later, this competency standard is problematic for at least three reasons. First, in an extensive meta-analysis covering 50-years of research, the authors concluded: “All [suicide thoughts and behavior] risk (and protective factors) are weak and inaccurate. This general pattern has not changed over the past 50 years” (Franklin, et al., 2017, p. 217).

Second, the number of potential risk and protective factors that counselors should be aware of is overwhelming. Granello (2010a) reported 75+ factors, we have a list of 25 (Sommers-Flanagan & Sommers-Flanagan, 2017), and even Cramer and colleagues lamented, “It would be impossible for clinicians to be familiar with every risk factor” (p. 6). Jobes (2016) referred to suicidology as “a field that has been remarkably obsessed with delineating countless suicide ‘risk factors’ (that do little for clinically understanding acute risk)” (p. 17).

Third, prominent suicide researchers have concluded that using risk and protective factors to categorize client risk is ill-advised (McHugh, Corderoy, Ryan, Hickie, & Large, 2019; Nielssen, Wallace, & Large, 2017). For example, even the most common suicide symptom and predictor (i.e., suicide ideation), is a poor predictor of suicide in clinical settings; this is because suicide ideation occurs at a very high frequency, but death by suicide occurs at a very low frequency. In one study, 80% of patients who died by suicide denied having suicidal thoughts, when asked directly by a general medical practitioner (McHugh et al., 2019). Even the oft-cited risk factor of previous suicide attempt has little bearing whether or not individuals die by suicide.

When AAS (2010) and Cramer and his colleagues (2013) described the risk and protective factor competency, eliciting risk and protective factors from clients was standard professional practice. However, in recent years, researchers have begun recommending that practitioners avoid using risk and protective factors to categorize client risk as low, medium, or high—principally because these categorizations are usually incorrect (Large, & Ryan, 2014). In a review of 17 studies examining 64 unique suicide prediction models, the authors reported that “These models would result in high false-positive rates and considerable false-negative rates if implemented in isolation” (Belsher et al., 2019, p. 642).

To summarize, this suicide competency boils down to four parts:

  1. Competent practitioners should still be aware of evidence-based suicide risk and protective factors.
  2. Competent practitioners are aware that evidence-based suicide risk and protective factors may not confer useful information during a clinical interview.
  3. Instead of over-relying on suicide risk and protective factor checklists, competent practitioners identify and explore client distress and then track client distress back to individualized factors that increase risk and enhance protection.
  4. Competent practitioners use skills to collaboratively develop safety plans that address each client’s unique risk and protective factors.

Although risk and protective factors don’t provide an equation that tell clinicians what to do, knowing and addressing each unique individual’s particular risks and strengths remains an important competency standard.

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As always, even though getting feedback on this blog is yet another mythical phenomenon,  please send me your thoughts and feedback!

 

 

 

Cool Counseling, Counseling and Psychotherapy Theory and Practice, Suicide Assessment and Intervention, Therapy with Adolescents, Writing

A Sneak Peek at Our Upcoming Suicide Assessment and Treatment Book with the American Counseling Association

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Spring Sunrise and Hay

Rita and I are spending chunks of our social distancing time writing. In particular, we’ve signed a contract to write a professional book with American Counseling Association Publications on suicide assessment and treatment planning. We’ll be weaving a wellness and strength-oriented focus into strategies for assessing and treating suicidality.

Today, I’m working on Chapter 6, titled: The Cognitive Dimension. We open the chapter with a nice Aaron Beck quotation, and then discuss key cognitive issues to address with clients who are suicidal. These issues include: (a) hopelessness, (b) problem-solving impairments, (c) maladaptive thinking, and (d) negative core beliefs.

Then we shift to specific interventions that can be used to address the preceding cognitive issues. In the following excerpt, we focus on collaborative problem solving and illustrate the collaborative problem-solving process using a case example. As always, feel free to offer feedback on this draft content.

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Collaborative Problem-Solving

Though not a suicide-specific intervention, problem-solving therapy is an evidence-based approach to counseling and psychotherapy (Nezu, Nezu, & D’Zurilla, 2013). Components of problem-solving are useful for assessing and intervening with clients who are suicidal. As Reinecke (2006) noted, “From a problem-solving perspective, suicide reflects a breakdown in adaptive, rational problem solving. The suicidal individual is not able to generate, evaluate, and implement effective solutions and anticipates that his or her attempts will prove fruitless” (p. 240).

Extended Case Example: Sophia – Problem-Solving

In Chapter 5 we emphasized that clinicians should initially focus on and show empathy for clients’ excruciating distress and suicidal thoughts. However, there often comes a moment when a pivot toward the positive can occur. Questions that help with this pivot include:

  • What helps, even a tiny bit?
  • When you’ve felt bad in the past, what helped the most?
  • How have you been able to cope with your suicidal thoughts?

In response to these questions, clients who are suicidal often display symptoms of hopelessness, mental constriction, problems with information processing, or selective memory retrieval. Statements like, “I’ve tried everything,” “Nothing helps,” and “I can’t remember ever feeling good,” represent cognitive impairments. Even though your clients may think they’ve tried everything, the truth is that no one could possibly try everything. Similarly, although it’s possible that “nothing” your client does helps very much, it’s doubtful that all their efforts to feel better have been equally ineffective. These statements indicate black-white or polarized thinking, as well as hopelessness and memory impairments (Beck et al., 1979; Reinecke, 2006; Sommers-Flanagan & Sommers-Flanagan, 2018).

Pivoting to the Positive

Picking up from where we left off in Chapter 5, after exploring the distress linked to Sophia’s suicide ideation in the emotional dimension, the counselor (John) pivots to asking about the positive (“What helps?”) and then proceeds into a problem-solving assessment and intervention strategy. One clearly identified trigger for Sophia’s suicidal thinking is her parent’s fighting. She cannot directly do anything about their fights, but she can potentially do other things to shield herself from the downward cognitive and emotional spiral that parental fighting activates in her.

John: Let’s say your parents are fighting and you’re feeling suicidal. You’re in your room by yourself. What could you do that’s helpful in that moment? [The intent is to shift Sophia into active problem-solving.]

Sophia: I have a cat. His name is Douglas. Sometimes he makes me feel better. He’s diabetic, so I don’t think he’ll live much longer, but he’s comforting right now.

John: Nice. My memory’s not perfect, so is it okay with you if I write a list of all the things that help a little bit? Douglas helps you be in a better mood. What else is helpful?

Sophia: I like music. Blasting music makes me feel better. And I play the guitar, so sometimes that helps. And volleyball is a comfort, but I can’t play volleyball in my room.

John: Yeah. Great. Let me jot those down: music, guitar, volleyball, and being with your cat. And volleyball, but not in your room! I guess you can think about volleyball, right? And how about friends? Do you have friends who are positive supports in your life?

Although the fact that Douglas the cat has diabetes includes a depressive tone, the good news is that Sophia immediately engages in problem-solving. She’s able to identify Douglas and other things that help her feel better.

Throughout problem-solving, regularly repeating positive coping strategies back to the client is important. In this case, John summarizes Sophia’s positive ideas, and then asks about friends and social support—a very important dimension in overall suicide safety planning.

Sophia: Yeah, but we’re all busy. My friend Liz and I hang out quite a bit. I can walk into her house, and it will feel like my house. But we’re both in volleyball, so we’re both really busy. But our season will end soon. Hopefully that will help.

John: Ok, the list of things that seem to help, especially when you’re in a hard place with your parents fighting: Douglas the cat, music, guitar, and volleyball, and friends. Anything else to add?

Sophia:  I don’t think so.

Often, the next step in collaborative problem-solving is to ask clients for permission to add to the list, thus turning the process into a shared brain-storming session. At no time during the brainstorming should you criticize any client-generated alternatives, even if they’re dangerous or destructive. In contrast, clients will sometimes criticize your ideas. When clients criticize, just agree with a statement like, “Yeah, you’re probably right, but we’re just brainstorming. We can rank and rate these as good or bad ideas later.”

Overall, the goal is to use brainstorming to assess for and intervene with mental constriction. During brainstorming, Sophia and John generated 13 things Sophia could do to make herself feel better. Sophia’s ability to brainstorm in session is a positive indicator of her responsiveness to treatment.