Tag Archives: Mental Health Academy

Counseling and Psychotherapy Theory and Practice, Clinical Interviewing, Personal Reflections, Suicide Assessment and Intervention, Happiness

The MHA Suicide Prevention Summit is Free (up to 20 CEUs) and Coming Soon!

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Why should you know about the Mental Health Academy’s annual Suicide Prevention summit?

It’s big. There are luminaries (e.g., David Jobes, Stacey Freedenthal, and Rory O’Connor). It’s free. And the MHA is an amazing Australian-based organization that gives as good as it gets. On their website, they report:

Supporting local initiatives
Through partnering with leading organizations around the world, we’ve been able to support local initiatives we’re passionate about, including helping prevent child abuse and suicide, expanding mental health services to communities in need, and more.
$1.7M given since 2009

As a part of the annual Suicide Prevention Summit, this coming Sunday, at 10:30am Eastern, August 23, 2026, I’ll be presenting. My talk is titled: “The Bad News Brain: Five Psychological Truths on Why It’s So Damn Hard to Focus on the Positive.”

Did I mention that this whole summit is free? You can get up to 20 CEUs. You can also pay $20 to have access to session recordings until October 18.

Here’s a link to the whole schedule, which begins Wednesday, August 19 at 7pm Eastern, with a presentation by David Jobes. In case you don’t know, Jobes is awesome.
https://d9hv9sikl36u8.cloudfront.net/documents/MHA-USA-SPS-2026-Schedule-V1.pdf

Not only is the live version of this event free, all the presenters also present for free.

Sometimes, when presenting online to large groups, like the Summit, it’s hard to know how the presentation is being received. This is especially true for webinar-style presentations where there’s no interaction other than the “chat feed.” The problem with using the chat feed for feedback is that it’s overwhelming. Trying to split my attention between doing my talk and reading participant comments requires repeated figure-ground shifts that render my brain dysfunctional. Consequently, I only focus on talking, ignore the feed, and wait for the illustrious Pedro Gondim to facilitate Q&R during the final 10 minutes.

Last time I presented at the Summit, a very kind, smart, and talented mental health professional I know happened to be in attendance. She wrote me a very short Dear John email:

See attached!
I have never seen anything close to this in terms of the outpouring of appreciation for you. 

All by itself, her email made my day. But she also attached the chat feed. I opened it and found a gift of 449 amazing comments. I was stunned and humbled.

This blog post is a reminder that you can still sign up for the Summit. MHA will use a portion of the funds they generate from the $20 registrants to give back to local communities. I hope to see you there—even though I won’t really see you.

Just in case you’re curious, here’s a link to the whole 449 chat feed responses (with last names of commenters deleted).

JSF COMMENTS from MHA TALK AnonDownload


 

Clinical Interviewing, Suicide Assessment and Intervention

Suicide Assessment: A Step-by-Step Guide

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In the lasting glow of Saturday’s Mental Health Academy’s annual Suicide Prevention Summit, I discovered 33 new blog followers. We had right around 3,000 for the session, and the chat-based posts were overwhelmingly positive and affirming. One person wrote, “You can use these comments to think about 1,000 good things from today.” The comments were THAT GOOD. I am deeply grateful for the positive feedback and amazing support of my work. Thank-you!

This year I’m embarking, along with Dylan Wright of Families First (thanks Dylan!), on something new, and possibly ill-advised. We’re hosting three Montana Happiness Project interns! My thinking was that because I’m growing long of tooth (haha), I need to begin formally passing on my knowledge and skills to the next generation. Of course, as most of you know, I’ve been passing on information and doing supervision for decades, but in this case, the process is somewhat outside of the University of Montana, and will involve a bit more mentoring. You’ll be hearing about this new wave of Montana Happiness stuff off and on in the coming months.

Here’s the first volley.

To get our interns ready, Dylan and I are creating content. I guess that makes us content creators. Cool. One of our first creations is a Step-by-Step Suicide Assessment Guide. I like to give stuff away, and so I’ve included a pdf of the guide here.

Suicide Assessment Step by StepDownload

This guide is designed to be used flexibly. Mostly, it’s a knowledge-base (complete with some interesting links) that you can use to frame how you do suicide assessment and safety planning. I hope it’s useful to you in your work.    

Have a fabulous Monday!

John SF