Preventing Patient Suicide: Clinical Assessment and Management in Today’s Psychiatry

Modern psychiatry poses significant challenges for practitioners, including limited treatment time and duration due to insurance requirements, understaffing, and split treatment arrangements. Additionally, high-risk, acutely suicidal patients are often admitted to inpatient units for short lengths of stay. To make matters more complex, law plays a pervasive role in psychiatric practice, redefining the doctor-patient relationship.

In this complex environment, clinicians must provide the best possible care to their patients, particularly those at high risk. Preventing Patient Suicide: Clinical Assessment and Management offers a cutting-edge guide to suicide prevention and management techniques, combining Dr. Robert I. Simon’s extensive clinical experience with the latest evidence-based insights from psychiatric literature.

Essential Techniques for Suicide Prevention and Management

The book addresses several critical topics, including:

• Sudden improvement in high-risk suicidal patients: determining whether improvement is real or feigned
• Misuse of suicide risk assessment forms: understanding their limitations
• Debunking entrenched myths and traditions about suicide, such as “imminent suicide risk” and “passive suicide ideation”
• The continuum of chronic and acute high-risk suicidal patients: assessing and managing risks
• The interaction between law and psychiatry in clinical situations: therapeutic risk management

In addition to these vital topics, the book features:

• Illustrative case studies and commentary on complex clinical situations
• Key points at the end of each chapter, highlighting critical information
• A Suicide Risk Assessment Self-Test, consisting of 50 questions designed to enhance clinician suicide risk assessment by incorporating evidence-based risk and protective factors

Dr. Simon’s nuanced, empathic, and pragmatic perspective provides a comprehensive guide to identifying, assessing, and managing suicidal patients while navigating the complex legal and clinical environment.

Published by American Psychiatric Publishing in 2010, this essential resource is available in English, with an ISBN of 9781585629343 (hardcover) and 9781585629473 (paperback).