Proactively Preparing Mental Health Professionals to Cope after Client Suicide

This capstone presentation explores the need for proactive training to address client suicide with social workers and other mental health professionals. Client suicide is, unfortunately, a frequent event in the mental health field and can be a traumatic experience for clinician-survivors. This project addresses the need for training and present practice solutions for this problem by presenting the findings of three papers that complete the capstone project.

The first product, the systematic literature review, addresses the research question: what proactive tools from an organizational perspective are currently used to address client suicide with mental health professionals? The presentation describes the literature review that was conducted and presents the findings. The second product, the conceptual paper, presents a conceptualized training plan rooted in social learning theory.

The third product, the practice application paper, builds upon the conceptual paper to offer a training curriculum that organizations can deliver to staff to address the realities of client suicide proactively. Together, these three products demonstrate a need for proactive interventions to address client suicide with mental health professionals, discuss the theoretical foundations of successful training interventions, and provide a curriculum that organizations can use to provide proactive intervention and support to their teams.