Thanks to the generosity of the Maryland Department of Health and the University of Maryland School of Medicine, I’ll be offering a free two-hour online training on Thursday, April 30 from 10am-noon (Eastern time). The flyer (attached below) includes details on the workshop content and a QR code for registering.
Along with Kimberly Parrow, this morning I have the privilege of offering a 3-hour workshop at the 2026 ACA Annual Conference.
As always, this is a challenging topic. But in the spirit of a strengths-based approach, it’s important to remember that by engaging in this learning together, we make ourselves stronger, more capable, and more prepared to help clients and students who are feeling suicidal.
Thanks to ACA for the opportunity, to Kim for the help, and for the attendees for being rockstars who are dedicated to helping individuals who are experiencing immense emotional pain and struggling with suicide. You are amazing.
You may be wondering (I know I am), what does a glimpse and quote from the illustrious Laura Perls have to do with suicide prevention slides for North Carolina State University?
If you have thoughts on the connection, please share. I see a connection, but maybe it’s just because I wanted to post both these things. First, here’s a bit of content from Laura Perls from our Counseling and Psychotherapy Theories text.
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Although the contributions of Laura Posner Perls to Gestalt therapy practice were immense, she never receives much credit, partly due to the flamboyant extraversion of Fritz and partly because her name, somewhat mysteriously (at least to us), is not on many publications. She does, however, comment freely on Fritz’s productivity at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy (an organization that she co-founded with Fritz).
Without the constant support from his friends, and from me, without the constant encouragement and collaboration, Fritz would never have written a line, nor founded anything. (L. Perls, 1990, p. 18)
REFLECTIONS
We hear resentment in the preceding quotation from Laura Perls. We feel it too, because we’d like to know more about Laura and for her to have gotten the credit she deserved. If you want more Laura, here’s a nice tribute webpage: https://gestalt.org/laura.htm?ya_src=serp300. And here’s a quotation from her (obtained from the webpage and compiled by Anne Leibig): “Real creativeness, in my experience, is inextricably linked with the awareness of mortality. The sharper this awareness, the greater the urge to bring forth something new, to participate in the infinitely continuing creativeness in nature. This is what makes out of sex, love; out of the herd, society; out of wheat and fruit, bread and wine; and out of sound, music. This is what makes life livable and incidentally makes therapy possible.”
Now, don’t you want to hear more from Laura?
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And here’s the North Carolina State University link:
Last week was a blur. On Wednesday, I did a break-out session for the Montana Prevent Child Abuse and Neglect conference in Helena. I’ve been to this conference multiple times and always deeply appreciate the amazing people in Montana and beyond who are dedicated to the mission of preventing child abuse and neglect. For the break-out, I presented on “Ten Things Everyone Should Know About Mental Health, Suicide, and Happiness.” This is one of my favorite newish topics and I felt very engaged with the 120+ participants. A big thanks to them.
Before the session, I felt a bit physically “off.” Overnight, the “off” symptoms developed into a sore throat and cough. This would NOT have been a problem, except I was scheduled for the hour-long closing conference keynote on Thursday. The good news is that I had zero fever and it was NOT Covid. The bad news was my voice was NOT good. I did the talk “In Pursuit of Eudaimonia” with 340ish attendees and got through it, but only with the assistance of a hot mic.
I had to cancel my Friday in Missoula and ended up in Urgent Care, with a diagnosis of bronchitis or possibly pneumonia, which was rather unpleasant over the weekend.
Having recovered (mostly), by yesterday, I recorded a podcast (Justin Angle’s “A New Angle” on Montana Public Radio) at the University of Montana College of Business. Thanks to a helpful pharmaceutical consult with a helpful woman at Albertsons, I had just the right amount of expectorant, later combined with a strong cough suppressant, to make it through 90 minutes of fun conversation with Justin without coughing into the podcast microphone. We talked about “Good Faith” in politics, society, and relationships. The episode will air in early June.
And now . . . I’m in beautiful Butte, Montana, where I’m doing an all-day (Thursday) workshop for the Montana Sex Offender Treatment Association. . . on Strengths-Based Suicide Assessment and Treatment . . . at the Copper King Hotel and Convention Center. Not surprisingly, having slept a bit extra the past five days, I’m up and wide awake at 4:30am, with not much to do other than post a pdf of my ppts for the day. Here they are:
Thanks for reading and thanks for being the sort of people who are, no doubt, doing what you can to make Montana and the world a little kinder and more compassionate place to exist.
For fans of Strengths-Based suicide workshops, this Friday I’m doing a three hour online workshop for the Western Oregon Mental Health Assocation.
The workshop is happening this Friday from 9-noon (PDT). It’s a pretty reasonable deal: $60 for licensed WOMHA members, $75 for licensed non-members, $35 for pre-licensed people, and $5 for students.
Sorry for the late notice, but here’s the link to register:
Tomorrow, December 4, I’m doing a quick one-hour version of my “Integration” workshop. Obviously, my leaning is toward the strengths-based, constructive approach to suicide assessment and treatment, but sometimes we need to integrate strengths-based approaches with the traditional medical model. That’s what this workshop is all about.
The workshop is presented on behalf of the Professional Counseling Association of Montana — the brainchild of Cynthia Boyle, a Ph.D. student in the University of Montana’s counseling and supervision program. Here’s a link to their website: https://pcamontana.org/
In case you’re attending . . . or interested . . . here are the slides:
It can be good to have an IOU. I knew I owed my former student and current colleague, Maegan Rides At The Door, a chance to publish something together. We had started working on a project several years ago, but I got busy and dropped the ball. For years, that has nagged away at me. And so, when I read an article in the American Psychologist about suicide assessment with youth of color, I remembered my IOU, and reached out to Maegan.
The article, written by a very large team of fancy researchers and academics, was really quite good. But, IMHO, they neglected to humanize the assessment process. As a consequence, Maegan and I prepared a commentary on their article that would emphasize the relational pieces of the assessment process that the authors had missed. Much to our good fortune, after one revision, the manuscript was accepted.
I saw Maegan yesterday as she was getting the President Royce Engstrom Endowed Prize in University Citizenship award (yes, she’s just getting awards all the time). She said, with her usual infectious smile, “You know, I re-read our article this morning and it’s really good!”
I am incredibly happy that Maegan felt good about our published article. I also re-read the article, and felt similar waves of good feelings—good feelings about the fact that we were able to push forward an important message about working with youth of color. Because I know I now have your curiosity at a feverish pitch, here’s our closing paragraph:
In conclusion, to improve suicide assessment protocols for youth of color, providers should embrace anti-racist practices, behave with cultural humility, value transparency, and integrate relational skills into the assessment process. This includes awareness, knowledge, and skills related to cultural attitudes consistent with local, communal, tribal, and familial values. Molock and colleagues (2023) addressed most of these issues very well. Our main point is that when psychologists conduct suicide assessments, relational factors and empathic attunement should be central. Overreliance on standardized assessments—even instruments that have been culturally adapted—will not suffice.
And here’s the Abstract:
Molock and colleagues (2023) offered an excellent scholarly review and critique of suicide assessment tools with youth of color. Although providing useful information, their article neglected essential relational components of suicide assessment, implied that contemporary suicide assessment practices are effective with White youth, and did not acknowledge the racist origins of acculturation. To improve suicide assessment process, psychologists and other mental health providers should emphasize respect and empathy, show cultural humility, and seek to establish trust before expecting openness and honesty from youth of color. Additionally, the fact that suicide assessment with youth who identify as White is also generally unhelpful, makes emphasizing relationship and development of a working alliance with all youth even more important. Finally, acculturation has racist origins and is a one-directional concept based on prevailing cultural standards; relying on acculturation during assessments with youth of color should be avoided.
And finally, if you’re feeling inspired for even more, here’s the whole Damn commentary:
Tomorrow morning (Wednesday, October 2) I have the honor and privilege of being the keynote speaker for Maryland’s 36th Annual Suicide Prevention Conference. So far, everyone I’ve met associated with this conference is amazing. I suspect tomorrow will be filled with excellent presentations and fabulous people who are in the business of mental health and saving lives.
I hope I can do justice to my role in this very cool conference.
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.
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.
Today, I’m online doing the final webinar in a three-part series for PacificSource. The PacificSource organizers and participants have been fabulous. Everything has worked smoothly and the participants have engaged with many excellent thoughts and questions. We’ve got 503 registered for today.
Here’s the title and description of today’s webinar.
Strengths-Based Approaches to Management of Patient Suicidality
John Sommers-Flanagan, Ph.D.
Healthcare providers need to do more than conduct suicide assessments; they also need to flow from assessment into providing interventions to help patients move out of crisis and toward greater emotional regulation, hope, and health. In this webinar, using video clips and vignettes, you will learn at least five specific assessment and management interventions designed to help facilitate patient transitions from crisis to constructive problem-solving. These interventions are based on robust suicide theory, clinical wisdom, and empirical evidence on strategies for working effectively with patients who are suicidal.
For anyone interested, here are the ppts for today:
John Sommers-Flanagan 