ACT for Suicidal Behavior

When a client reveals they’ve been thinking about suicide, it can quickly change the dynamic in therapy.

In the wake of these disclosures, clinicians often feel a range of complex emotions, from fear to anger to helplessness.

Their minds swirl with weighty questions. Should I consider hospitalization? How do I best help this person? What if I say the wrong thing? 

And due to a variety of factors — including their deep care for the client, employer expectations, and potential legal ramifications — therapists can feel it’s their responsibility to compel clients to choose life. 

All of these experiences can converge to create a sense of paralysis. 

Clinicians who are familiar with acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) often find that, in these cases, their own flexibility can suffer as interventions become driven primarily by fear.

Acceptance-based approaches may seem off-limits. Values work takes a back seat. And the focus shrinks in many ways to risk calculation and prevention strategies.

Risk assessment and prevention have an important place in a clinician’s response when a client mentions taking their own life. At the same time, shifting completely into a “checklist” mindset can put the clinician and client at odds with each other, placing strain on the therapeutic relationship, and often excludes many interventions that would be effective in the context of suicide.

The truth is that, even though suicidal behavior is objectively frightening, it serves a purpose for clients who view their pain as unbearable or unacceptable.

If clinicians can facilitate openness toward that pain instead of turning away — scary as that may be — it opens the door for deeper connection and even opportunity in high-risk situations:

It fully acknowledges the client’s suffering as well as their humanity without being pathologizing. 

It also creates a space where clinicians and clients can view suicidal thoughts or intent through a behavioral lens, uncovering the function it serves for the client as well as alternative means of reducing suffering.

This helps clinicians connect with more freedom in how they engage with the problem, allowing for work that is broader, deeper, and more elastic.

What’s more, it fosters a generative and collaborative therapeutic environment where the primary goal is not only to prevent death, but to explore the many ways a client can choose life, even in the presence of pain.

If you’re familiar with ACT but struggle to maintain a flexible approach in the context of suicide, we hope you’ll join us in this important training, ACT for Suicidal Behavior.

Inside, Drs. Robyn D. Walser, Sean M. Barnes, and Lauren M. Borges will guide you through an ACT approach to suicidal thoughts and behaviors, giving you a framework for responding with more flexibility and efficacy when it matters most.

Inside the course

ACT for Suicidal Behavior is a live online course that will empower you to bring a different perspective to suicide. You’ll learn how to respond in a way that’s driven by flexibility rather than fear, and how to not only prevent death more effectively, but to also foster engagement in life.

In 4 sessions, you’ll explore a functional contextual perspective of suicidal behavior and how to adapt the ACT approach to maximize your efficacy and bolster a strong therapeutic relationship during treatment. 

Drs. Walser, Barnes, and Borges will speak to each of the 6 core ACT processes and how to utilize each in the context of suicide, including how they can inform your approach to standard assessments and safety planning measures. You’ll also engage in exercises to explore your own experience surrounding suicide and see role plays that demonstrate course tools and concepts in action. In the final session, you’ll also join the trainers for a discussion on what to do when a client does take their own life.

Everything you’ll learn in the course will allow you to:

• Foster collaborative and generative sessions when a client discloses they’ve thought about taking their own life
• Work with the client to uncover the function of suicidal behaviors and explore workable alternatives that support valued living
• Utilize creative hopelessness effectively in the context of suicide to create space for more variable and adaptive means of coping with suffering
• Bring the ACT lens to gold-standard procedures for suicidality to ensure they support psychological flexibility 
• Practice taking a stance of flexibility to obstacles you may face in this context, including the anxiety or fear you might experience as a clinician

Suicidal behavior is, unfortunately, something most mental and behavior health clinicians encounter in their practices at some point, regardless of setting or specialty. Whether you typically work with high-risk populations or not, this course can help you discover more options that are available to you as a provider, as well as to the client, following a disclosure, allowing you to respond with more freedom. 

After taking the course, you’ll be better equipped to address this pressing issue with an approach that is effective, direct, and decidedly human to help clients discover more flexible ways of engaging with pain and pivot toward life. 

This training offers 8 CE hours if attended live. We can only provide CE to those who are present via Zoom for the live sessions. However, the sessions will be recorded and available to watch later. Registrants may access these recordings at any time for up to nine months after the live training ends.

Before enrolling, please review conflict of interest disclosures and complete CE information here.