Hope in Action: Solution-Focused Conversations About Suicide

Respectful and effective solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) for suicidal clients

Few tasks are more important--and daunting--than to help someone who is suicidal to go beyond the darkness of hopelessness to the light of hope. Hope in Action: Solution-Focused Conversations About Suicide is a unique resource providing fresh approaches to treating individuals and families where suicide is an issue. This comprehensive book provides a thorough grounding in using a solution-focused therapy approach to elicit and reinforce hope and reasons for living. Strategies are demonstrated with stories, case vignettes, and transcripts. Special applications include some of the most challenging high-risk clients that therapists treat, including people who make repeated attempts. This powerful resource offers a set of practice principles based on the existing empirical evidence in the context of clinical utility and client expertise.

Hope in Action: Solution-Focused Conversations About Suicide provides case transcripts to help in role-play or rehearsal situations as well as numerous practical tips. The book also provides lists of solution-focused questions for use in various situations, including suicide crisis, the use of anti-depressant medications, facilitation of collaborative working relationships with colleagues as well as clients. Each application chapter gives therapists practical, hands-on tools and uses stories and illustrations to make the book user-friendly. The text also offers a brief appendix on the basic skills of SFBT.

Topics discussed in Hope in Action: Solution-Focused Conversations About Suicide include:

• current knowledge about preventing suicide at the individual level
• helping clients to utilize their strengths even when they are in crisis
• how research in diverse areas supports the solution-focused approach
• effective treatment for couples and families when one member is suicidal
• basic approaches to effective therapy with young children and teens who have attempted suicide
• respectful, effective therapy with people who seem to have adopted being suicidal as their primary coping strategy
• therapeutic tools that help the therapist to stay hopeful about clients and strengthen the therapeutic relationship

Hope in Action: Solution-Focused Conversations About Suicide is a valuable resource for counselors and therapists at every experience level.